The start of this week saw two significant dates in the recent history of broadcast journalism: on Tuesday, GB News celebrated its two-year anniversary; the day before, Ofcom announced that it was going to carry out audience research into politicians presenting TV programmes.
GB News is not the only channel to employ sitting MPs. Nadine Dorries has a weekly show with TalkTV. But it employs no less than four, with long-term co-presenters Esther McVey and Philip Davies joined this year by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson. (There is also Arlene Foster, if peers count.)
All of this is perfectly within the current rules, which only prevent serving politicians from serving as news readers or in similar roles where there is no overt editorialising:
“In general, serving politicians cannot be a newsreader, interviewer or reporter in any news programme. They are allowed to present other kinds of shows, however, including current affairs. Sometimes those programmes may be on channels that also broadcast news; what matters here is the format of the particular show.”
Of course, Ofcom is the regulator and can change the rules. And the rapid spread of the MP-presenter is a new phenomenon. Serving politicians have had regular TV gigs before (Diane Abbott opposite Michael Portillo on the This Week sofa, for example), but that isn’t quite the same thing. So there’s nothing inherently sinister about Ofcom assessing it.
And regardless of what they conclude, it says something interesting about the evolution of what our editor has dubbed “the right-wing entertainment industry” – of which the pre-eminent platform is GB News.
That this should be so in 2023 would surely have surprised sceptical observers of the new channel (myself include) back in 2021. After a rushed and amateurish launch, the most plausible scenario seemed to be that News UK, backed by the financial might of Rupert Murdoch and the media machine which built Fox News, would learn what lessons it could and then eat GB News for breakfast.
Suffice to say, that didn’t happen. Whilst there has been a lot of churn, both in what’s broadcast and behind the scenes, GB News has remained comfortably ahead of its putative rival.
Nor has the channel gone completely down the “all blowhards, all the time” wormhole predicted by Matt Deegan. There have been departures from its original line-up, and Nigel Farage did get his own show. But ex-Labour MP Gloria de Piero is still there, Michael Portillo now hosts a Sunday programme, Eamonn Holmes anchors the breakfast line-up, and so on.
And whilst it might not have gone down the capital-intensive route of producing full news packages, there have been shifts in that sort of direction: more news breaks, fewer multi-hour magazine shows, and even (with Charlie Peters’ documentary on the Rotherham grooming gangs) some original investigation.
Will that be enough to ensure GB News’ long-term future? That remains to be seen. Turnover of experienced producers reportedly remains high. There is also not yet any sign of the £5 subscription model that was reportedly part of the original monetisation strategy; that the station has recently stopped providing transportation to studio guests suggests that is an unsolved problem.
But its medium-term future seems secure enough. Which allows us to ask the bigger question: given the undoubted political leaning of the channels and the intentions of their financial backers, is “the right-wing entertainment industry” a boon to right-wing politics? That’s less obvious.
Consider Liz Truss’s recent turn on Dan Wootton Tonight. The first question, after the obligatory one on Boris Johnson, was whether or not she agreed that the looming mortgage crisis vindicated her economic policy. She plays up to it, and laments:
“I think what we’ve discovered is that politicians in Westminster don’t actually have those levers to get things done. You can be elected as a party leader, as a prime minister, and pull those levers but there are other people who are not necessarily on board with those decisions.”
Not mentioned, at all, are where Truss and Kwarteng would have found the spending cuts they promised to balance their tax cuts. At the Conservative Party Conference in October, I talked to various advisers and analysts about where they might do it, and ended up writing this:
“Beneath the dismay is a growing suspicion that there simply isn’t a viable Truss project at all. The core of the problem is simple: in order to calm the markets, Kwasi Kwarteng has pledged to balance his £43 billion of unfunded tax cuts with cuts to public spending. Yet no politically viable path to cuts on that scale exists.”
There is nothing wrong with wanting lower taxes or the state to consume a smaller share of GDP; it is almost certainly true that if nothing changes we risk smothering the economy behind a metastasizing entitlements state.
But the difficulty is how you get there. The big-ticket demands on the public finances – pensions, social care, the NHS – are very sticky, and popular with core Conservative voters. Truss was also making big promises on behalf of Thérèse Coffey, the then-Health Secretary, at that very conference.
Given a half-hour to interrogate Truss, even the most sympathetic interviewer surely ought to press her on how she intended to square this circle. Instead, what we got was another airing of the conspiratorial version of events, where it would all have been fine if not for the Blob.
And this may be especially significant in a TV format, precisely because the UK (unlike the US) has a culture of relatively non-partisan broadcasting. Thus, Truss’s exculpatory thesis may land differently to when she set it out in print, as she did at length in the Daily Telegraph.
This doesn’t just apply to economic policy, either. From jailing more criminals to cutting immigration to scrapping retained EU law to problems with the Civil Service, there has in recent years been a chronic gap between the rhetoric of Conservative politicians and their engagement with the complicated business of actually delivering on it.
The decline of the in-depth, long-form political interview long predates GB News, of course. But that a friendly interview doesn’t pose the obvious dangers of an adversarial “gotcha” one doesn’t mean it doesn’t pose dangers of its own.
If we have learned anything from the Johnson saga (and how long until someone offers him a show?) it is that reflecting people’s hopes back at them can make for great entertainment, but less often good politics – and rarely, if ever, effective government.