Welcome to the Errordome: GB News is a clusterfuck but it’s establishment approved and isn’t going away any time soon
Sorry to piss in your porridge but GB News will continue to crash but refuse to burn
It was GB News’ first full day of broadcasting yesterday and already Tom Harwood — think Rolfe from The Sound of Music without the redeeming features — the channel’s political correspondent had ‘earned’ himself the third question at the Number 10 briefing. Looking like a preposterously young League One manager explaining why the team had lost again (“At the end of the day, the lads are tired…”), Harwood tried to stuff as many queries as possible into his time slot:
Thank you, Prime Minister. We’ve heard a lot about how we want this roadmap to be completely irreversible, and after that four weeks, hopefully, all those restrictions are gone and don’t come back. But we also know that in the winter — in the late autumn — these diseases can spring up again pretty naturally, they can get pretty nasty. The health secretary has previously spoken about a plan for booster jabs in the autumn, and I was wondering when are we going to get to see that plan? When can the media and the scientific community helpfully scrutinise and help out with that plan?
And when will those jabs going into people’s arms, in the autumn to avoid these restrictions ever coming back again. And just one extra questions to the scientists, given that we know this sort of nasty variant is spreading much more pervasively among young people, are we considering at all opening up that excellent Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccine to the under-40s?
Boris Johnson praised it as “a very good question”, appreciating no doubt how soft-boiled it was, then proceeded to not really answer it.
It was appropriate that Harwood looked — as Damon Evans noted — like an embattled football manager facing relegation stood as he stood in front of a GB News logo-splattered backdrop as the new channel continued to score own goals and make embarrassing misses throughout its first day on air.
Presenters, especially former BBC man Simon McCoy, spent large stretches of time apologising for technical issues, failing to throw to clips, and speaking to guests whose mics didn’t seem to be turned on.
But beneath the blizzard of technical fuckups, the channel’s agenda was clear. The same topics came up over and over again across the day — ‘cancel culture’, taking the knee, international aid, and most of all refugees in the channel. I switched on yesterday morning to find Colin Brazier and Mercy Muroki being schooled by a man from Amnesty on the reality of asylum applications, with their ‘I reckon’ ideas crumbling against the hard reality of facts.
Hours later, Michelle Dewberry was ‘welcoming’ Tony Parsons — cosplaying as the long lost Kray brother, the one who stood at the back and egged the others on — onto her show Dewbs & Co to share his uninformed opinions on the issue. Parsons, a Sun columnist and novelist who started out writing for the NME in 1976, is the kind of silenced voice GB News exists to platform; it had been days since he’d had the chance to share his views with the nation — he’d been canceled by print schedules!
Dewberry, who presents with all the professionalism and skill of a competition winner lost on the QVC set, encouraged Parsons to deliver a monologue on immigration that was resolutely fact-free. Ignoring that France deals with vastly more asylum cases than the UK and that the number of asylum seekers coming to the UK is far, far lower than it was 20 years ago (35,566 people sought asylum in the UK in the year to December 2019 vs 84,000 in 2002), Parsons hooted:
People trafficking is France’s biggest export… the biggest danger asylum seekers face there is a stale apricot croissant.
Police violence against refugees in France frequently makes the headlines but Parsons thinks it’s all larks and patisserie for desperate people.
Just like his ex-colleague and now GB News presenter, Dan Wootton, Parsons speaks entirely in tabloid cliché. In an early segment discussing the delay to the final lifting of lockdown measures, he shifted into a grim tone to declare:
Boris Johnson is turning the UK into a coronavirus Narnia where it’s always winter and never summer.
The ‘drama’ of his monologue was undermined by Dewberry’s introduction — “Joining me is Tony Parsons…” — ending with the camera cutting to a large pot plant.
While Dewberry starts everything sentence as if she’s unsure what is waiting at the end of it, she has a lot of very certain views. That was apparent in the first of a regular series of segments on ‘public sector waste’, where she was joined by the Chief Executive of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, the think-tank dedicated to advancing the interests of people who do everything they can to pay no tax at all.
In line with GB News strategy to claim balance by scattering a few tethered left-wing guests throughout the schedule rather than actually demonstrating it within individual conversations, the TPA’s John O’Connell, who began as an intern in 2009 and still resembles an evil Harry Potter, was able to make a series of claims about international aid unchallenged.
O’Connell was safe in the knowledge that Dewberry agreed with him. She nodded her head more vigorously than a novelty on a car parcel shelf. When she did mention arguments against the view she and O’Connell clearly shared, she introduced them with a sneering framing: “What about people who talk about ‘soft power’ and all this and that…?” I can think of no better summation of Dewbs & Co than a phrase that Dewberry repeated often, “I just think it’s awful…”
I suspect that GB News is desperate for Ofcom to bite and is goading it with shows that don’t even put up a pretense of balance; it’s as if GB News is hurling itself off the tightrope while staring directly at the regulator, a toddler pushing its luck because it knows that dad isn’t going to do anything about it.
When the issue of immigration was once again raised during Andrew Neil’s show, he delivered a monologue where he called the still extremely small numbers of people crossing the Channel “boat people”, implying that huge waves of refugees. ‘Debates’ about immigration in the British media are often empty but GB News’ were strikingly and deliberately fact and context-free. It was like watching television broadcast live from the fetid centre of Richard Littlejohn’s brain.
Neil’s show also featured the first editions of ‘Wokewatch’ and ‘Mediawatch’, segments the Ronseal-faced carnival barker has been promising since news of GB News first broke. The Mediawatch section featured Neil claiming that the BBC had tried to block his channel’s accessed to pooled footage — something he’s also complained to Ofcom about — despite the fact that GB News seems incapable of reliably playing clips anyway.
His guest for Wokewatch was a real get… GB News presenter, alleged satirist, and perpetual humour vacuum Andrew Doyle. As Doyle honked on about “what real people think” — another fact-free, portion of deep-fried bullshit — Matt Hancock was on his feet in the commons delivering a statement on lockdown restrictions that the Speaker had forced him to deliver. GB News viewers did not see it.
Perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing, given that GB News’ attempt to show the Prime Minister’s press conference had begun with a false start. After Dewberry had teed up the high probability that it wouldn’t work properly, it didn’t. Boris Johnson was on the screen but there was no sound to go with it, forcing the channel to cut back to a stilted panel discussion while the technical issues were resolved.
Still, Neil and Doyle preferred to make up their own news rather than cut to some actual news happening. When Hancock’s statement was finally referenced, GB News viewers still didn’t get to hear any of it. Instead, it was filtered through the channel’s political team — Harwood and Darren McCaffrey — who appeared in split-screen to report into Neil’s big giant head, consigliere checking in with the gammon godfather.
Just as Harwood elbowed GB News into establishment acceptance with his press conference question, McCaffrey’s interview with Priti Patel — recorded across a day of access last week — has got the channel into the papers. It’s referenced across the British press today, with The Times giving it a front-page story headlined, England team playing gesture politics by taking the knee, says Patel.
As I’m writing this edition of the newsletter, The Great British Breakfast — less the name of a TV show, more a menu item at a cafe that says you’ll get it free if you can manage the 12 rashers of bacon, 10 sausages, a large portion of chips, fried tomato, four fried eggs, and enough beans to drown a sailor — is trailing the appearance of Michael Gove, who has added GB News to the morning’s media round.
There are many confident predictions of critics that GB News will not make it through a full year of broadcasting, but I’m not so sure. While the channel plays at opposition by indulging the rage of lockdown ‘skeptics’, its culture war politics are in line with the government’s own and the Tories will offer lots of support — public and otherwise — to the venture. And, for all its posturing about being a maverick gang of outsiders, GB News is an outfit stuffed with media ‘veterans’ and people like Wootton whose ties with the newspapers are deep and squalid.
Is it any surprise that Jan Moir’s review of the new station is splashed on today’s Daily Mail front page with the headline Soviet-era sets, glitches galore… but at last! TV news to revoke the woke. GB News is the Daily Mail comment section turned into television and Wootton, also a highly-paid MailOnline columnist, is its more impure distillation. After opening his first show on Sunday with a conspiracist rant, he repeated the act on Monday night’s broadcast, and has filed a hysterical dispatch for MailOnline about his solo TV debut.
Wootton, a man whose first show featured appearances by two Lords, has the gall to present his thoughts under a headline castigating ‘the elite’ — There was only one thing certain about the launch of GB News, the liberal elite were going to hate it but we aren’t doing it for them, we’re doing it for you — and writes:
I want to give the silenced majority a voice again.
What on earth is there to feared from a balanced broadcaster that will feature all perspectives of the debate?
In fact, that phrase – All Perspectives – is the name of the parent company of GB News for good reason.
I’ll tell you what I do believe in and support: capitalism, genuine free speech, social liberties and respecting democracy. That’s pretty basic, right?
That’s after he goes after a list of prominent UK broadcast journalists clearly hoping that one of them will rise to the bait and give him the social media feud he wants.
Last night, Wootton’s sterling efforts to “give the silenced majority a voice again” included interviews with Roger Daltrey, the singer in little known rock combo The Who, and little-known American news presenter Megyn Kelly, who he fawned over so much that he started to resemble a minor character from Bambi.
The ‘debate’ part came in the form of a completely confected fight between Harwood and Wootton over lockdowns which they’d been previewing in Twitter spats before the channel debuted. To anyone schooled in the world of professional wrestling, this was all too transparent — Harwood framed as the babyface (the young ‘good’ guy) and Wootton as the heel (the bad guy) to be booed and cheered in equal measure.
Harwood made a big play on Twitter of how he and Wootton were able to ‘debate’ on the show. This sort of pantomime will be key to GB News’ claims of ‘balance’ and ‘diversity of thought’ as if a minor scuffle between a former Guido Fawkes bag carrier and a former Sun gossipmonger turned MailOnline hate spewer is Frost/Nixon for the modern age.
With senior cabinet ministers like Gove and Patel making themselves available to the channel and Harwood instantly allowed a prime spot during the press briefings, GB News is going to get all the help it needs to stick around. The fact that its the Crossroads of current affairs, with rickety sets, awful presenters, incessant technical errors, and all the intellectual heft of the copy on the back of a cereal packet won’t matter — it will be treated as if it’s serious by people with power.
I talked to a good number of people on Sunday and after I published yesterday’s edition who argue that I should simply ignore GB News because if we do that, it will go away. But when its getting a plum spot to question the prime minister and having its interviews reported on the front page of national newspapers, it cannot simply be ignored. It exists to push the tone and content of what passes for political debate in the UK even further to the right. GB News are cowboy builders, unable to construct a TV channel that doesn’t constantly fall over but entrusted with remodeling the Overton Window all the same.