This week, Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber are joined by Gavin Esler and Michael Crick as they get stuck into GB News, broadcaster bias—and what it’s like to watch and appear on the channel.
Previously, Alan had tasked Gavin with watching GB News’s output for a month. The outcome? Tory MPs interviewing Tory MPs, “shallow” reporting, and a lack of balance not just about politics but about the reality of issues such as housing in UK society. Michael Crick is a contributor to GB News—albeit a combative one—and explains why he continues appearing on the channel, despite repeatedly calling for it to be shut down.
With such a lack of impartiality, how does the channel dodge being challenged by the regulator, Ofcom? Plus, ahead of the looming general election, tighter rules apply to broadcasters. How will GB News be able to report on the poll with so many politicians involved as presenters?
This episode of Media Confidential was recorded in front of an audience.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Lionel: Welcome to a very special edition of Media Confidential. We’re recording this episode in front of a distinguished, invited audience at Prospect HQ in London.
Alan: Welcome to everyone here in the auditorium and everyone at home. This is Media Confidential, the weekly deep dive behind the headlines and beyond the clickbait to get to the heart of the story in the fast-moving, vital world of the media. I’m Alan Rusbridger and, Lionel, you’re here in the flesh, which is not always the case, but here you are suntanned. You’re not wearing a lycra, which you sometimes are, but you’re looking good.
Lionel: Relax, Alan. I’m in Tokyo next week.
[laughter]
Alan: The important thing is you’re here today. Those of you in the audience will have noticed that we’re joined today by not one, but two guests. For the benefit of our listeners, we’re lucky to have with us two giants of broadcasting.
Lionel: Gavin Esler is here and Gavin has occupied most news roles in the BBC. I guess most notably North American Correspondent and Newsnight Presenter. Welcome Gavin.
Alan: Next to Gavin, it’s Michael Crick, a founder member of the Channel 4 News team. Before joining the BBC, he’s been the bane of many a politician’s life. Welcome Michael.
Michael: Thank you.
[applause]
Alan: Today, GB News, we’ve been keeping an eye on their activities, mainly at their balance and who the presenters and guests are. The channel recently fell foul of Ofcom’s rules on impartiality, but will face no sanctions. We’re recording on Wednesday morning, just as the latest edition of Prospect drops, which has got three big pieces looking at GB News. I think what we want to talk about today is why the channel has escaped the sanctions and scrutiny that you would have expected from a great regulator like Ofcom.
Remember to listen and follow Media Confidential wherever you get your podcasts. We’re also on X, formerly Twitter, where we’re at mediaconfpod.
Before we begin, Lionel, how has your week been and what has caught your eye?
Lionel: I think the trailer and then the full text of Tim Davie’s speech, Director General of the BBC, calling for or acknowledging that there’s going to have to be a reform of the license fee. For me, what was striking is the notion that the BBC really does need private capital. At this time, they’ve taken obviously a 30% cut in real terms in the amount of money available since 2010. They’ve had to make lots of cuts. BBC World Service really hit.
They’ve got, I think the technical term is screwed, by George Osborne in the negotiations over the license fee back in 2015. I’d say watch this space. It’s a bit ironic, of course, because a number of Tories have been saying the license fees are bust anyway.
Alan: I thought it was a good speech, actually. He managed to define the BBC’s purpose very crisply. Number one was pursuing truth without an agenda. I thought that was a quite crisp way of what the BBC is supposed to be doing. Number two was backing British storytelling, an important part of what the BBC does. The third one was bringing people together, which I think is important in an age of polarized media. I thought it touched lots of good bases.
The odd thing is this panel that they’ve set up to look at the future of the license fee a week after the BBC, the government, has set up its own panel. I’m very skeptical about the government’s panel. With somebody we’ve had on this podcast, David Elstein, who is for 30 years has been advocating a different funding model for the BBC. You’d sense there’s another Tory spin doctor on the panel.
They look as though they’ve been hand-picked, as is the way often with these government exercises to get the result that they want. You’ve got the BBC looking at the question, the government looking at the question. I suppose the question is whether that government, whether we’re going to have the same government by the time that review panel comes back to report.
Lionel: Probably not, but the interesting and important point is that Tim Davie’s actually now got on the front foot. You really do feel, particularly in the last two or three years, that the BBC has just been under the cosh and not thinking ahead and trying to help set the agenda. Anyway, Alan, what’s on your radar?
Alan: Actually, I was going to throw a question. You’ve stolen my subject, but that’s all right. I’ll steal your subject.
Lionel: Cool creative. [crosstalk] I’ll come up with another one if you want.
Alan: The Telegraph bid, which now looks as though it’s completely dead in the water, the Emirati bid, but the RedBird IMI vehicle that was used to purchase £1.2 billion worth of Barclay assets, or Lloyds Bank assets, as it was. They’ll be able to sell off the Telegraph, maybe to Paul Marshall, who we’re going to come along and talk about, but there’s still £600 million worth of debt which is guaranteed against Barclay assets. I hope you’re going to explain to us why that’s--
Lionel: You were doing very well.
Alan: I was doing well.
Lionel: You never did any business journalism. The only business story you did was that tax story on Tesco that got the Guardian in terrible trouble, but anyway.
[laughter]
Alan: Was it the Lycra jab that got you going? Anyway, explain why the other 600 million--
Lionel: Well, you were doing so well, Alan. The fact is that the Barclay assets, and remember, these two reclusive twins who dressed just like each other, there’s only about two public photographs available of them. They did own the Ritz, they owned something called Ellerman Lines, the shipping lines, and then they owned the Telegraph Group but of course, the top assets like the Ritz were sold off. What they got is an online delivery service and retail, this thing called awful name, Very.
I’m sure that Very is not worth several hundred million pounds. These assets are declining in value and therefore the collateral that RedBird, that’s the group in New York headed by Jeff Zucker, the former boss of CNN, they got the Gulf money They were borrowing against assets like Very. I would say they’ve really had two slaps around the cheek here, one, the new law introduced by the government banning foreign ownership or influence in British media. Second, the money, that loan is in real difficulty.
Alan: Couldn’t happen to nicer, people. Anyway.
Lionel: By the way, do read the New York magazine, Michael Wolff, on the RedBird IMI bid, it’s very readable. Michael always has a bit of an agenda, but he’s done a slightly better job than a lot of the British [crosstalk]
Alan: A bit of color about Nadhim Zahawi, is that right?
Lionel: Zahawi wanted to be the chair of the business bits like Very, which was spun out of the Telegraph Group.
Alan: We could go on.
Lionel: We could, but we’re going to move on with our guests now.
Alan: Gavin and Michael are here and we’re going to be discussing GB News. Gavin, he’s looking actually quite well, considering what I asked him to do, which is actually something that probably no one else has ever done, which is to watch a month’s worth of GB News because we see little snippets here and there about this soundbite or that soundbite. I thought actually it would be a good idea just to do what I’m sure even Ofcom hasn’t done, which is to actually watch the output as a whole. How was it, Gavin?
Gavin: It was awful. It was absolutely awful. Every editor that I’ve ever worked with understands that if you’re a journalist, you’re curious. Alan sent me a very short email which said, “Would I like to do some reporting for him?” That was it. I of course had to phone him back and he said, “Would I like to watch television for a month?” To which I said, “How hard could that be?” Then he said it was GB News, which I’d never bothered to watch for some reason like 68 million other British people.
I switched it on to have a look and see what I was letting myself in for at five o’clock on a February day. I saw one hour of a really uncomfortable presenter shifting in his seat, interspersed with vast numbers of promos for other presenters, including the one I was looking at, shambolically edited, with almost no news whatsoever. I phoned him up and said, “Essentially, I didn’t want to do this.” He said, “Why?” I told him, he said, “We’ve got the story now, put the phone down.”
[laughter]
They’re very cunning people.
Alan: We’re going to come back to your trauma because you’re obviously desperate to talk about it. That would probably be good for you to talk about it. Michael, you actually appear on this channel occasionally even though you disapprove of it. How do you reconcile those two things?
Michael: It all stems from really from the referendum, the 2016 referendum. I think that one of the reasons that Remain, which is what I voted for, lost the referendum, is that not enough people on the Remain side were making the argument. I’ve always fought for-- I was brought up in a tradition at ITN of impartiality. I remember a senior executive saying, “You’re far too opinionated, Crick, you’ve got to have an opinionectomy.” I had an opinionectomy, it was very painful.
In mainstream traditional broadcasting for decades, we have this understanding that we’re impartial and balanced. A lot of the time we don’t know what each other’s views are. I don’t know if Gavin would agree with that. I remember David Nicholas, the great editor of ITN in the ‘80s, he used to have this maxim that if we get an exclusive interview with God, then it’s the first duty of the news desk to ring up the devil and give him the right to reply. That was the basis on which I worked.
I got increasingly unhappy about the way Channel 4 News was going and the teens when I returned there. There seemed to be some people on the program who regarded it as their job to overturn Brexit and bring down the government. I thought that was wrong. Now I’m no longer in mainstream broadcasting I’m allowed to express my views or find out again what my views are. I do think that the case has to be put on a channel like GB News.
You can’t just let people of the opposite opinion, and I think actually the net zero argument is a much more important one here, by the way. That you have to stand up and make the point because otherwise, it goes the other way by default. That’s what happened with Remain. For a couple of decades, there were very few people in the public who were willing to make a positive case for our membership of the European Union. I think if more people had been willing to do that, at all levels, the referendum might have gone the other way. That’s my philosophy there. I can understand it does look hypocritical. I’ve actually said, I think seven times on air now on GB News, that Ofcom ought to close them down, on the grounds that they’re not impartial, they’re not balanced, they’re not fair. They are essentially a right-wing propaganda channel. They’re not journalism in the sense that we all know it. Based on curiosity, it is a channel really trying to change public opinion, change people’s minds. It is overwhelmingly dominated by people of a right-wing point of view.
Indeed, astonishingly, vast numbers of people who either are politicians in the Reform UK party, or Conservative party, increasing in reform actually, interviewing each other. You get Farage interviewing Tice, and then Tice interviews Farage, and then Patrick, Christie interviews one or the other. He used to be Farage’s press officer. Those are my reasons.
Alan: This is a family broadcast, I should say.
[laughter]
Lionel: Michael, thank you for that brief introduction about why you appear on the channel. I think we’re going to hear a clip now of what happened when you appeared alongside Neil Oliver.
Speaker 1: On this channel, on GB News, in the company of Michelle Dubin, you said that you thought GB News ought to be shut down. Now that would appear [crosstalk]
Michael: Wel, because you’re biased, you’re right-wing. You do things like you have, you’re basically-- I’ve been fighting bias in television for a very long time. It’s one of the reasons I left Channel 4 News because I thought it was left-wing biased. I think Ofcom, who are one of the weakest institutions on the planet, should get a grip on you lot. It’s absurd that you have Tory MP, after Tory MP, after Tory MP, two leaders of the Brexit party, and hardly any Labour MPs. You are a right-wing channel. The rules in this country are very clear.
Presenter: There is no doubting. There is no doubting. I don’t think you can deny that the channel has made space for all kinds of voices, left, right, and [crosstalk]
Michael: No, they’re predominantly on the right. Look at when Nigel Farage takes the week off, who replaces him? Who replaces him? The leader of the Brexit, of Reform UK. There’s 67 million people in this country, you choose to replace Nigel Farage, it’s his successor, his Brexit party leader.
Speaker 1: We’re going into a break. Bare with us.
Michael: You’ve got Boris Johnson, you’ve got Jacob Rees-Mogg, you’ve got Philip Davis, you’ve got--
Alan: The political leaning of the channel has, if anything, moved even further to the right.
Lionel: Perhaps we should just come in with a few stats. Depending on who’s actually broadcasting, obviously, Farage gets into several hundred thousand. Without Farage, they’re down in the tens of thousands. Crucially, we need to know that GB News wants to be the UK’s leading rolling news channel by 2028. The interesting stats are actually on social media. 620,000 on X, formerly Twitter, 896,000 on TikTok, and 1.2 million on YouTube. Of course, that’s the way broadcasting and live streaming is going.
It’s going into the social media space. You can’t use traditional statistics to necessarily measure, reach, and we’ll talk about it, influence. It’s also been the home of many outspoken broadcasters, which has ended in car crashes, like Dan Wootton, Laurence Fox, Calvin Robinson, have all been jettisoned for being too extreme. It’s also provided a platform for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. It’s only recently that Ofcom has begun to wave a feather duster and announced that it’s quite cross with it and could get crosser.
Anyway, as I said, the cover story of this month’s Prospect Magazine is written by Gavin Esler. I think we should hear more. Gavin, you’ve told us of your trauma at having to watch it. If you watch this over a prolonged length of time, Michael’s talked about the lack of balance. That was your experience too?
Gavin: There’s a pseudo-balance. There are occasional people who have put up as Aunt Sally’s for, I’m not saying that you’re Aunt Sally, Michael, but perhaps you are.
Michael: Probably was. [laughs] I know I was, actually. [laughs]
Gavin: You probably possibly were. There is a balance. What’s interesting is very few people seem to watch it actually as a television program or channel. It is, as Lionel said, on social media, quite influential. Just to take one example, Nigel Farage, who is actually quite an accomplished broadcaster, I think we can all agree whatever else we think of him. He was talking and they are absolutely obsessed with Islam and Muslims coming here to take our jobs and all that stuff.
There was one very revealing hour that I watched. There was a woman from Church of England charity called Sanctus called Sally, who is involved in the conversion of those people who wish to change from Islam to Christianity, which is something that’s been going on for centuries. Nigel Farage constantly suggested it was all phony. He called them apostates. Actually, the dictionary definition of apostate is someone who’s genuinely converted to Christianity. He didn’t seem to know that.
Sally at one point said to him, “You do know that Christian Bible and Christianity is based upon a refugee story.” Nigel Farage seemed to be quite astonished that a Christian person would reference the Bible in some way. What I thought was interesting about that was it was a very telling point and he treated her politely. I couldn’t find any clip of that on social media. That was something that I saw repeatedly.
In other words, if people like Michael Crick made points which undermined the agenda that was being discussed, they tended not to appear. The one exception I asked Michael if he’d ever seen his cell phone social media from him. I think you said not at all. I did see one when it was Lee Anderson and you were quoted on that. Of course, I saw you repeatedly suggesting that it should be taken off air because of that particular clip.
In general, it seemed that people who were discordant voices that didn’t quite fit the agenda were either ignored or were ignored on social media. Just one other point, the ability of them to tell stories was very interesting. For example, there was one other episode where they were talking about the explosion of Turkish barbershops in our country, exploding Turkish barbershops. These are people who take cash. How dare they?
The implication well, beyond the implication was that some of them are therefore involved in nefarious practices, money laundering, and various other things. This was all said, or alleged. The Turkish barbershop ended up because they have exclusive film of an arrayed on “Turkish barbershop,” which was owned by an Albanian. Albania is not in Turkey, as we know.
There was one person who the border force had a look at because that person didn’t seem to have the ability to work in our country for some reason, presumably because it was a refugee from Colombia, which is also not in Turkey. The sum up at the end of the piece was, and so you see, it’s all a front for nefarious practices. It’s very shrewd in the sense that if you’re not really paying attention, if you’re not trying to dissect it, you would perhaps fall for the conclusion rather than what was in the rather odd report. That was time after time, that same pattern was repeated.
Allan: I was very struck because a lot of the-- We know about all the Tory presenters. I think they’ve been paid £600,000 in the last year, just to Tory MPs to present programs.
Lionel: It’s that way they’ve lost 40 million?
Alan: The sizable chunk of it. Yes. I think £1,000 to Labour MPs. Also, there are presenters I’d never heard of. When you Google them, they’re nearly all from Reform, or this even tinier party Reclaim that was led by Laurence Fox. You must have met some of these people, Michael.
Michael: I’ve met most of them. Yes. Some of the more, there was Michelle Dewberry, for instance, who does the afternoon, she’s a former Brexit Party candidate. There are about a dozen people who have got serious backgrounds in either the Conservatives or Reform UK [unintelligible 00:21:13]. The only one who you could say is an ex-Labour person is Gloria De Piero. She was a Labour MP, coincidentally, for Ashfield as well. Lee Anderson is the MP for-- Ashfield got a big presence on GB News.
There are not many Labour people now, they would argue. Well, we’ve tried and they have. They did in the early days when GB News, was rather less right-winging its early guys. It was run by-- Basically, Andrew Neil was the star presenter. John McAndrew who’s now head of BBC News, was a big cheese there. Robbie Gibb, who I know you’ve written about at length was [crosstalk] For Teresa May. Then before that, a senior editor at the BBC.
They did make a huge effort to try and get people like Trevor Phillips, Alastair Campbell, to be presenters. I know this from my research into a book I wrote on Farage. After Andrew Neil left and Robbie Gibb left to become a BBC trustee and so on, and then Farage was brought in, it moves significantly to the right. I think there was intended to bring in Farage, but nobody dared to tell Andrew Neil that. They gave up the idea of seriously trying to get other Labour presenters.
More and more they’ve been pushing the boundaries. I bet they can’t believe how little Ofcom has cracked down on them. They’ve had a couple of reports, haven’t they? Inquiries where they’ve reprimanded GB News, but come out with no sanction. There’s a whole load more inquiries going on. Quite why Ofcom have been so weak. I don’t fully understand.
Alan: Let’s unpack that Michael, because you’ve studied it closely. To my mind, I’m almost offering an opinion here, but they really have thought this out about how to game the rules. Blurring the distinction between news and current affairs and opinion. Tell us a little bit more about, it’s not just Ofcom weakness. They’ve been very clever.
Michael: They did bring in people with a very long experience of mainstream news programs to advise them on this. Who, combed through the Ofcom rules. The Ofcom rules are pretty unclear and vague in various places. GB News came up with this line that within news, you’ve got to be balanced and impartial and fair and so on. When it comes to current affairs, you can do a program with nine people from the Conservative Party. As long as you have another voice on the other side, that’s okay.
That’s basically the model on which they’ve worked. Ofcom seems to have endorsed this model, this idea that there is this distinction between current affairs programs, which are basically analysis and discussion, and the news bulletins. Now people who are much more expert than I am in terms of Ofcom regulation, say that this is a completely false distinction that we’ve never had in the past.
Panorama and World in Action never operated, for example, well-known current affairs programs, never operated on those bounds. Ofcom and GB News together seem to have changed the rules here with no public debate. That’s what really gets me. If you’re going to make a change like that, a huge change, you have to have some public debate.
Lionel: What about the use of politicians or experts?
Michael: That didn’t start with GB News. Let’s be honest about this. Where did it start? I think it probably started with LBC. I used to do a program regularly, there was a program on Saturday mornings with Ken Livingstone and David Mellor. That was all right, because there were the two of them, and they were sort of balanced. Before that, actually on Sky, Austin Mitchell and Norman Tebbitt did a program about 30 years ago.
Gradually LBC started having programs presented by one presenter of one opinion. You’ve got Nick Ferrari and James O’Brien, but then you also have politicians of one opinion. Gradually, the rules have been pushed back there. Of course, TalkTV have done it and TalkRadio and Times Radio have done it as well. GB News have done it in a big way. I think once you get into the area of politicians presenting programs, politicians interviewing each other, it gets really, really difficult.
What are Ofcom doing about the fact that we are going to have an election within the next nine months? The election spending rules have already kicked in. Why haven’t the Ofcom rules on elections, which are very strict, you have to be there with a stopwatch in traditional telly, making sure that you’re giving the same percentage to Labour as you are to the Conservatives and a slightly smaller one to the Liberal Democrats. Whereas nobody seems to know what’s going to happen with Ofcom.
Lionel: Gavin, you did approach the Electoral Commission on this?
Gavin: Yes, I approached the Electoral Commission. They essentially said, “Not one for us, Gav, at the moment.” They said there’s nothing on their agenda on that. I also talked to an Ofcom source that I can’t identify. I think it’s slightly more interesting, actually, that there has been a debate, but it’s not been a public debate. There is a debate within Ofcom. The debate is between those who say we are being goaded by GB News, who are slowly, slowly moving the goalposts, and they’ve moved it quite a bit in the past year.
Others who say, “Well, we can’t crack down on a television channel, which is allowing clearly at some level a diversity of opinion.” That debate goes on and whether they will actually change their minds over the next few months, because of the election is not clear to me.
Michael: Of course, this is all within the context of the leadership of Ofcom being a big subject. For a couple of years, there was a big debate about whether Ofcom was going to be run by Charles Moore, or whether it was going to be run by Paul Dacre. In the end, the chair is now Michael Grade, who is getting on a bit but has an extremely distinguished record in mainstream broadcasting.
Alan: He’s only as old as Joe Biden.
Michael: Is he? Right. [laughs] He’s run virtually every mainstream outlet there is. He is a great believer in free speech and thinks that this is fair enough. It seems to me that the mindset of Ofcom is still in mode of trying to please Conservative masters. They don’t seem to realize that coming down the road are likely to be some Labour masters. I do hope that Labour don’t react in the opposite direction and clear out Grade and anybody else they think needs to be cleared out and install Labour stooges because that would just make the situation worse.
Labour have to ensure that the leadership of Ofcom is truly independent, and somebody whose political views we don’t know, preferably.
Lionel: Alan, we’re going to come to that bit more about election year. You’re listening to Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger and me, Lionel Barber. After the break, we’ll be back with more discussion of GB News in the election year.
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Lionel: Hello, and welcome back to Media Confidential. This episode has been sponsored by the award-winning management consulting firm Q5. Q5 has a singular driving passion, organizational health, which separates good organizations from the great. As a global consultancy, Q5 partners with business leaders and organizations around the world providing support with organizational strategy, design, leadership and team development, culture, technology, change, and transformation.
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This week, she talks to the journalist and broadcaster Andrew Greystone on a related matter because he’s written a profile of Paul Marshall, the major shareholder of GB News and one of the frontrunners to buy the Telegraph.
Speaker 2: He’s a very, very wealthy man. He’s worth personally something like £800 million, but he’s also an extremely generous man. He gives away around £5.5 million a month, according to the Sunday Times giving list. He’s justly called a philanthropist. That’s a wonderful thing, but as with all philanthropists, you need to think, “Well, what exactly is he buying? Is this entirely open-handed giving? Is it paying it forward, as it were? Or is he through that philanthropy trying to exercise, as most philanthropists do, trying to exercise some kind of influence?”
The more I looked at it, the more I thought, actually, if you connect together the things that Paul Marshall is putting his money into, yes, then he is trying to exercise influence in very particular ways.
Lionel: Follow and subscribe to the Prospect Podcast, where there’s a rich archive of interviews with guest writers and regular columnists for Prospect. Also, you can enjoy an upgraded digital experience with the new Prospect app. Stay informed, engaged with our independent journalism at your fingertip, read or listen anywhere and at any time. The app not only gives you access to our articles but also includes audio narration plus podcasts like the one you’re listening to right now.
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Alan: Back now to GB News. As we mentioned before the break, we are in an election year. Michael, I want to ask you how you think GB News is going to cover the election?
Michael: With difficulty. In that some of their presenters, well, as things stand, are candidates in that election. Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose program I did last night, is planning to stand again.
Alan: How was it for you?
Michael: It’s always fun. I do TalkTV as well. In fact, I did both yesterday. Well, TalkTV is fun as well. I do enjoy it. I enjoy debate.
Alan: Not with Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Michael: I love debating with him. I’m that kind of person. He is, but a lot of which we don’t agree, there are some things we do agree. He’s a candidate in the election. Richard Tice is standing in the election for Reform UK in Hartlepool.
Lionel: Peter Mandelson’s old constituency.
Michael: Lee Anderson, I imagine, will be fighting. I think he’s definitely fighting, who just defected, of course, from the Conservatives to Reform UK. He’s standing again in Ashfield. Under the rules, you can’t be a candidate in an election and presenting programs at the same time. When that starts is unclear to me. Whether Ofcom are going to say, “Look, it’s got to be more than just when the Prime Minister goes to the ballot and gets an election.” It was got to be before then. I don’t know.
Whether Ofcom are going to apply-- Normally what Ofcom do, and in conjunction with the mainstream broadcasters, is they agree a proportion formula. It’s a bit like a football team, 4-4-3, but that wouldn’t work as a football team because it’s 11. Apart from the goalkeeper. What I mean it’s four parts Conservative, four parts Labour, and three parts Lib Dem plus the SNP implied in those countries.
Now, whether they’re going to lay down that and say, “You on GB News have got to stick by that rule or not.” I think they have to because the point is that GB News are licensed by Ofcom. GB News proudly say again and again, whenever I discuss this on their programs or behind the scenes, “We are regulated by Ofcom.” Those Ofcom rules about balance in an election, fairness-- The silly thing, which I think, times Ofcom rules go too far personally, but they’re there, so we have to obey them.
That thing where they do a constituency report and then they come up with a list of all the 10 people standing in that seat, that GB News would have to abide by that as well. Whether this is going to happen or whether Ofcom is going to say, “Well, actually, we’re changing the rules this time, everybody’s more relaxed.” I think what broadcasters like myself who’s spent 40 years working, we used to live in terror of Ofcom.
Producers would be constantly frightened that we’d done something that wasn’t-- They would invent rules that didn’t exist. They were so terrified. Up to 40 years of obeying all these rules, we suddenly find the rules don’t apply. Nobody’s ever formally announced it.
Alan: I was just going to, because Gavin, you were schooled in impartiality at the BBC. Can you just talk about the gulf between how you were trained at the BBC to regard due impartiality, and of course the BBC comes under criticism for not being duly impartial? What you saw during your months of watching off with GB News, was there any touching point there?
Gavin: You’re right. It’s due impartiality. Therefore the word due--
Alan: Just unpack what that means.
Gavin: That’s a very good question because that’s the vague bit. It’s not quite the same as having so many minutes for one lot and so many minutes for another lot, but that was how it was broadly interpreted. There was a stopwatch literally put on people. If you had a number of programs over the course of a day or over the course of a program, you were expected roughly to have the same amount of time for different people and different viewpoints. This is obviously not possible with GB News.
They’ve got another problem, which is that Rees-Mogg and Farage are two of the more competent presenters. A lot of the others are really, really quite weak as television presenters. If they’re going to lose those during the course of the campaign, what would they have? What insight would they have? Of course, they’re hemorrhaging money. That’s the other point. They’ve got a number of problems. Michael is absolutely right.
Ofcom looking at them will presumably at some point have to come to a conclusion as to whether they represent a political viewpoint fairly consistently. They seem to do so. For example, Anne Whittacombe is another regular on the program, another pro-Brexit person. She was on a program, one of the episodes that I looked at, which was talking about how migrants are deliberately part of the housing crisis.
Now, again, nobody saying that one of the problems with the housing crisis is we’re not building enough houses. There was no opposing view on that. It’s not just party political views that are not represented in a reasonable degree of balance. There are other views that are not represented. Finally, just one other thing, there was an investigation by the Daily Mail, which was given coverage on GB News, which is conversions the other way from presumably Christian households to Islam.
That was given quite a bit of prominence. Rees-Mogg, to be fair to him, actually asked the reporter involved, “Well, did you talk to any of the parents of these children who were becoming Muslim?” She said, “No.” Now that’s very, very odd. Why not? Why is the supposed reporting so obviously shallow? There’s two different questions about balance. One is the political balance. The other is a basic balance of ideas and facts. Many of the facts, for example, a Colombian isn’t from Turkey.
This has got nothing to do with money laundering. How can you possibly suggest barbershops are involved in it without any evidence? That is never interrogated in the programs that I watch.
Alan: Try to put yourself in the shoes of an Ofcom inspector. I don’t know if Ofcom do this. It seems to me the Ofcom work on a system of complaints. You haven’t got anybody in Ofcom doing what you’ve done. Is there any way with your training in BBC impartiality that you could regard what you watched as in any sense, impartial?
Gavin: No.
Alan: Right. [laughs] What interests me, and this partly explains that the makeup of the magazine today you’ve talked about the obsession with Islam on these programs. We know from the work that I hope not [unintelligible 00:38:47] did of Paul Marshall’s apparent interest in this, I won’t say obsession, but they looked at the things that he was liking and retweeting. Some of them were a version of the Great Replacement.
The so-called Great Replacement theory, which says that the people from the global south, especially Muslims, there’s a scheme in which they’re coming here to replace the indigenous White population of the global north. There was one tweet that Paul Marshall liked that said, “It’s only a matter of time before civil war starts in Europe. The native European population is losing patience with the fake refugee invaders. If we want European civilization to survive, we need not to just close the border but start mass expulsions immediately. We don’t stand a chance unless we start that process very soon.”
That was a tweet that Paul Marshall liked. He says that doesn’t necessarily represent his opinion but he’s a clever man. I don’t know what he’s doing liking those kind of tweets if he doesn’t agree with them. You’ve got a channel that is putting this stuff out, you’ve got the owner that believes this stuff. The Andrew Greystone piece then looks at the way he’s putting the money in the evangelical bit of the church.
He started an organization called The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which is all about Judeo-Christian values and getting back to those. Then this guy Calvin Robinson, who’s probably the strangest cleric in recent history, who was hired as a GB News presenter. Again, we asked somebody, Andrew Brown, to watch his programs because once he got slung off GB News, he’s now got his own channel, his first guest, Tommy Robinson.
You’ve got this Black cleric interviewing the head of the EDL, the English Defense League. Governor Robinson incidentally also believes that Joe Biden has had a child with his own daughter. There’s a conspiracy theory wing nuts that we’re dealing with. All this comes back to Paul Marshall and GB News.
Gavin: One of the things that is absolutely striking about watching it is that constantly, despite talking about Islam, constantly, constantly, they never once in any of the viewing I did, suggests that Islam is anything other than a monolith. Muslims are from different backgrounds and different cultures have different ways of worshiping God just as Christians do.
The complexity of Islam and the differences between perhaps what you might see in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and what you might see in Malaysia or elsewhere, never ever occurred to them.
Apart from the loathing, that was clear in all of it, it was the lack of interest in a culture which embraces more than a billion people on the planet. It struck me as so deeply offensive to somebody like me from a Presbyterian background in Scotland. It is utterly appalling. It went on and on and on in different ways. They’re taking our houses, they’re taking our jobs, they’re taking over, they’re taking over London apparently. Absolute nonsense.
Alan: I think this is straight out of the Fox News playbook. I’ve spent 12 years working in the States watching the rise of Fox back in the ‘90s under Roger Ailes, and then obviously through the Tea Party, the anti-Obama, they’re playing up. The birth of conspiracy Obama is not really American. Immigration, which is an issue by the way. It will be a huge issue in November that what’s happening on the border. Fox News has propagated conspiracy theory. It’s propagated Islamophobia.
It’s been extremely, extremely powerful. Obviously, big role in the election, propagating the idea that the election was stolen from Trump. I think that GB News has taken that lessons from Fox’s success. What’s worrying, again, my opinion here Michael, if you’ll allow me, Paul Marshall has a big stake in GB News. He’s now, I believe, the favorite to take over the Telegraph. Now that the foreign bidders that’s dead, I think Daily Mail would have competition problems.
He’s got an unheard as well. He’s really the coming force in British media, is he not?
Michael: Indeed. This is happening with very few people have brought the three together like you have. Of course, if he was buying up a series of television channels or a series of newspapers, it probably would be subject to Monopoly inquiry or off-come inquiry or whatever. The fact it’s three different types of app media outlets probably makes it easier for him to do so. Certainly, he’s a coming force in the land and actually pinning down his politics is very difficult.
Alan: You knew him.
Michael: No, I can’t say I knew him but I’ve come across him. 10 years ago, the first time I came across him, he was setting up a Liberal Democrat think tank. [laughs] He’s moved pretty rapidly in the last 10 years. Who’s to say whether he’s going to move more rapidly in one direction or another over the next 10 years? An increasingly powerful force in the land.
Alan: Did this piece of reporting that we’ve got in Prospect for the first time make sense of where his obsessions lies? At one point, looking through his charitable donations, which all go through, an organization called Sequoia. There’s £18 million last year, goes to an organization called Ralston College. I bet neither of you have heard of Ralston College.
Ralston College, I looked it up, was a tiny, tiny liberal arts college in Savannah with 24 students.
You think, well, why is Paul Marshall giving £18 million to a liberal arts college in Savannah? It’s only when you look at the staff, the chancellor is Jordan Peterson, who is the controversial Canadian sociologist who is also leading light in his organization, ARC, the Alliance Responsible Citizenship. You see the threads being pulled together, and it does make you wonder how long before Ofcom wakes up to what is happening. This man is going to be the kingmaker in conservative politics after the--
Michael: Indeed. Farage is going to have an important role over the next 12 months. What Farage does in the election, I don’t think even he knows yet. There is the question about whether he will take over Reform UK. Remember people very rarely say this, but Nigel Farage actually owns Reform UK. He owns a majority of the shares in Reform UK. Reform UK is not a traditional party with members and a national executive and annual conference that votes and so on. It is a dictatorship.
It was set up for that purpose by Farage because he was fed up with all the democracy they used to have in UK for not having [unintelligible 00:46:21] on the national executive that lasted all day. The trouble with fact for Farage is the timing. He loves being a broadcaster. He’s always wanted to be a broadcaster. He doesn’t really want to stand in a constituency again because he keeps losing.
He also wants to play a role in the American election because he’s besotted by Trump and he wants to spend a lot of time as the election reaches its climax there. He can’t balance all of these. Then the question is, what happens to him afterwards, depending on the result? Assuming the conservatives do really badly, Reform UK won’t get any seats, but they may get a decent share of the vote and maybe blame for the scale of the Tory’s failure.
When Farage was at the Conservative conference last Autumn, as a broadcaster everybody was cheering him. All the conservative ordinary delegates were worshiping him. It was extraordinary to see the leader of another party come to a mainstream British party and be met with such adulation. You had the Prime Minister, you even had Tom Tugendhat saying, “Farage would be welcome in our party.” He is got that choice to make.
Seems to me that whatever happens to the Conservative Party and Reform UK after the next election, as I think Tim Montgomery has said, who’s a friend of Paul Marshall and involved on the fringes of GB News, that GB News is going to be playing quite a role in that next leadership election, which of course may happen before the general election actually-
Alan: Along with the Telegraph. Gavin
Gavin: That’s an important point because one of the puzzles I had was who actually watches this stuff apart from me. It turns out if a ConservativeHome found that many, many, many members of the Conservative Party watch GB News now that puts them in the position, not just to elect the leader of the Conservative Party, but as we saw with Liz Truss to elect the Prime Minister potentially of our country. They are people who consume GB News according to ConservativeHome very avidly. I think we have got a problem.
Michael: I think if Farage would be elected by the membership of the Conservative Party, if it was purely down to them, the only thing that stops him becoming leader of the Conservative Party. Remember he was a Conservative before and he tried to become a Conservative MP 20 years ago, while he was an MEP in the European Parliament, the leader of the group. The thing that stops him is this rule that A, you’ve got to be an MP to start with, and B, you’ve got to be nominated.
You’ve got to get whittled down to the last two amongst the parliamentary party. I think if Farage decided to switch, he would become an MP easily enough. Ddepend on who the leader was at the time. I can see Farage, there’s a 20% chance, I’d say, of him become a leader of the Conservative Party. Now, the wider point is GB News, he’s going to play a role in all of this.
What’s striking actually is as many people come up to me in the street, occasionally come up to me at the street or on YouTube or whatever and say, “Oh, I saw you on GB News.
I like your appearance. I like GB News.” As many people say that, as used to say, they’d see me on Channel 4 News. The audience is not insignificant I would say. It’s not huge, but it’s not insignificant. [laughs]
Alan: On that bombshell thought of Farage’s route through to becoming our Prime Minister. We should thank both our guests today for coming along. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Do read Prospect, which tries to draw all these themes together, three pieces that we mentioned. Lionel, we’ve had you in London for two weeks now. Are we going to see you next week in London?
Lionel: As I mentioned, I’ll be off in Tokyo. I’ll be broadcasting with you either at midnight or very, very early in the morning. Watch this space. I’d like to thank everybody for coming to join us today. Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
[applause]
Alan: First time Martin has ever had that kind of applause.
[laughter]
Lionel: They were clapping us, Martin, didn’t they?
[laughter]
You can send any questions or comments to Media Confidential at prospectmagazine.co.uk or get in touch on X, formerly Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
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