Quizzed by MPs last week on Ofcom’s alleged failure to rein in bias at the broadcaster GB News, the quango’s chairman Sir Ian Cheshire proposed a novel solution: “I would encourage [former ITN editor] Stewart [Purvis] and Alan [Rusbridger] and others to set up the left-wing version of GB News.” Form an orderly queue, everyone.
The BBC, ITN, and Sky will have to work to regain viewers’ trust
Sir Ian’s grasp of reality appeared shaky early on in the proceedings when he described Ofcom as a “highly respected regulator”. The quango is routinely accused of bias by both sides of the political spectrum, though this is not necessarily a bad sign. More alarming was its latest annual news consumption report that initially omitted data showing that channels like GB News were more trusted by its viewers than the BBC. Ofcom only published the full figures after being publicly challenged.
And now the Ofcom boss’s daft solution to claims and counter-claims of bias at a right-wing broadcaster is the creation of a left-wing alternative. I suppose it might prove useful for identifying the most bone-idle Labour MPs; those willing to cash in with TV jobs, rather than do the hard graft in Westminster or their constituencies, à la GB News’s Nigel Farage, who, as some wag noted, has spent less time in Clacton than Storm Austen.
All I could imagine this week, however, when reading ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s own musings on a “Woke TV” to take on GB News, was an image of wannabe Che Guevara Owen Jones in the hot seat lecturing his viewers on the moral imperative of buying a pro-Palestinian poppy, rather than the plain, red imperialist variety.
There are plenty of concerns militating against a dedicated, left-wing TV news channel: there won’t be sufficient advertising revenue; it will undermine public trust in journalism.
But simply on entertainment grounds it sounds dire. There will be sixth-form virtue signalling aplenty on Woke TV; hand wringing for days. Imagine the predictable, self-righteous op-ed pages of the Guardian read to the camera by a cast that looks like a diversity seminar. Who would watch that?
At the end of the day, journalists and broadcasters are in the entertainment business. Love them or hate them, people with populist appeal like Jacob Rees-Mogg have the power to amuse or entertain.
Nigel Farage is even more Marmite – and anathema to me – but you couldn’t call him dull, even if his gobby, man-down-the-pub nonchalance is starting to fray under the scrutiny and pressure of various finance probes.
In the Before Times, when I worked as a Fleet Street reporter – before Google churn and X, before ubiquitous digital media, when expense accounts and generous deadlines permitted long lunches and the time to construct original stories – I’d take a conservative MP or a right-winger out for lunch any day over a lefty.
Some of them were villains, but they were always more fun and more likely to cough up something interesting. Earnest lefties, on the other hand, would wince at the offer of a Michelin-starred fish meal and a bottle of Meursault – but chow down all the same and repay my efforts with dull platitudes. Which makes me think Woke TV would bomb, even if anyone were silly enough to try it.
More seriously, Sir Ian’s comments to MPs suggest he might not be fully aware of his responsibilities at Ofcom, given the organisation’s remit to ensure broadcasters’ impartiality. Rusbridger himself lampooned the idea of creating a “rabidly left-wing channel to mirror the nightly Reform propaganda that spews out of GB News.” But his comments suggested he wasn’t entirely against the idea. “The more I think about it, the more I think he’s onto something,” he wrote.
Really? Let’s hope not.
For a yoof demographic that appreciates screechy, left-wing broadcasting, Novara Media is on YouTube several hours a day. Mehdi Hasan is also seeking to build up the profile of his left-wing Zeteo Media in Britain. Hasan is clever and articulate, but also smug and condescending. Having a corrupt and deranged US president as a giant, orange target to aim at makes things easy for him in the States, but Hasan’s relentless disdain might struggle to find a large audience here.
And people can get their left-wing fixes from James O’Brien on LBC, who somehow manages to rant more amiably.
We don’t need Woke TV. In this age of AI bots, foreign interference, and growing stupidity, what we need is good, trusted mainstream TV news. But the BBC, ITN, and Sky will have to work to regain viewers’ trust. That means broadcasting a better balance of stories and views. Some ex-BBC viewers would argue it already resembles Woke TV.
The political needle has moved to the right in Britain. Whether the left likes it or not, dismissing, for example, anyone who expresses concern about immigration as a racist no longer works. The legacy broadcasters should start from there.
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