I first heard of GB News whilst on holiday in Torquay in May 2021. It was towards the tail end of the COVID19 hysterical and freedom-denying nightmare known as the ‘pandemic’. Not content with condemning two of the most travel-hungry individuals in the world to a week on the self-styled ‘English Riviera’, fate also ensured it was officially the wettest May in Devon since 1952 (the year of the infamous Lynmouth flooding, which claimed the lives of 34 individuals).
With Mother Nature effectively imprisoning us in our bargain-basement Britannia Hotel room (think Colditz but with Dunelm chic!), we occupied a lot of our time by flicking through the various Freeview channels on our microscopic TV. It was then I came across the testcard for GB News, and the announcement that the new channel would be launched by that legend of political punditry, Andrew Neil, on the 13th of the following month. It promised to be a revolution in UK news broadcasting, offering a voice to those increasingly excluded from mainstream news narratives and worldviews. I promised myself I would give the channel a fair hearing once it had been launched.
I am so glad I did. GB News has proven to be a real breath of fresh air. For a start it’s channel whose presenters share a common objective of being unashamedly patriotic – a quality long since banished on many other news outlets. It has probed controversial areas of current affairs that others would not have touched by others had it not been for the risk of them losing ratings and being left behind. The migrant invasion across the Channel, for example, was first given extensive coverage by Nigel Farage on GB News shortly after its inaugural broadcast. Today, it is covered by all the news channels and has even spurred the government into trying to tackle the issue. As someone with Northern Irish ancestry, I also appreciate the positivity GB News has afforded to the Orange parades on the Twelfth. Instead of lazily and inaccurately stereotyping the Loyal Orders as beribboned demonstrations of sectarian bigotry, GB News has contextualised the parades as the resultant cultural expressions of the Glorious Revolution – an absolutely intrinsic part of British history.
GB News had its enemies from the start. Lefties had barely swallowed their last gulpful of early evening quinoa on the date of the first broadcast before they were chomping at the bit to get the station banned. They even set up a website (https://boycottgbnews.org/advertisers) urging corporate brands to boycott advertising on the channel in the hope that a loss of commercial revenue would strangle the project at birth. Despite all their best efforts, GB News has gone from strength-to-strength. It’s now firmly established as a staple on the UK news menu; it has several shows that have exceeded the ratings of rivals on the BBC News, Sky News and ITN; Nigel Farage himself won ‘News Presenter of the Year’ at this year’s TRIC Award ceremony in London; with the channel scooping the coveted prize of ‘Multichannel News Programme’ winner at the same event (https://www.gbnews.com/news/gb-news-breakfast-wins-tric-awards-2023#:~:text=GB%20News%20Breakfast%20overcame%20strong,Channel%20scooped%20the%20top%20gong)
So now we come to the comments made by actor Laurence Fox on the Dan Wootton Tonight show last week. They were inappropriate, childish, nasty and unnecessary on a mainstream news channel – no doubt about it (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66940513). In the same way that the eating habits one adopts in a kebab shop on the Walworth Road after 10 pints would not be acceptable in Simpsons In The Strand, the sort of misogynistic banter a group of lads on a weekend bender in Magaluf would enjoy is unacceptable on a news and current affairs channel, and especially a news channel firmly in the cross hairs of the Blob. It is right that Fox was suspended and an apology issued. What is not right are the increasingly hysterical calls for GB News to be taken off air as a consequence. I don’t recall similar demands being made of Radio 2 after Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s cheap humiliation of veteran actor Andrew Sachs back in 2007. Were the baying wolves calling for Newsnight to be permanently cancelled after false allegations implicating Lord McAlpine in an abuse scandal pertaining to a children’s home in North Wales came to light? No chance! So why GB News? It all comes back to a broadcast media world, overwhelmingly dominated by individuals who would be wholly congruous on the liberal Notting Hill evening dinner circuit, and their detestation for a news channel that gives a voice to what they ignorantly (and with sentiments every bit as offensive as Fox) dismiss as ‘gammons’ and karens’. Their bile against GB News is, in some respects, worse than what Fox said. For whereas the latter can be dealt with by disciplinary protocol, the former have the sinister agenda of banishing any form of analysis out of step with their Net Zero, uber-trans, open borders, multiculti, all-singing, all-dancing, joss stick and fragrant candle-burning paradigms. Worse still, they believe they’re accountable to nobody other than themselves. These perma-agitated censorious Lefties worry me far more than Fox’s ill-chosen crudity.
Efforts by the Left to encourage a corporate mainstream advertising boycott of GB News have already borne fruit insofar as commercial breaks there feature a range of somewhat quirky products – from Raging Bull biltong to tipples from the Pembrokeshire Gin Company. However, it was a pleasant surprise to discover travel experts Trailfinders have now given GB News a seal of approval. It would be an absolute tragedy if the Establishment succeeded in cutting the channel off altogether, for make no mistake that is their ultimate aim. Take Adam Boulton, formerly of the Sky News parish, as an example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbfNJL3aCco). Not only does he think organisations like the BBC and ITN are “fair and impartial” (on whose planet, I’ve no idea), he also thinks ‘The People’s Channel’ should be taken off air permanently! What a grim future that would herald!! You could just imagine prissy voices from the preening Establishment saying: “Why should the average working class Joe have a channel to give vent to their concerns? Far better to be indoctrinated by the Vines, the Brands, the Freis and the O’Briens, what!”
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