Kath Viners’ glass house meets some stones.

by Pseud O'Nym

Yesterday there was this headline in The Guardian;‘ GB News has paid more than £660,000 to Tory MPs since its launch’ And just to make absolutely sure that the virtue signallers who read it could choke on their homemade muesli, it was billed as an exclusive and given lead story status.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog in relation to Guardian ‘exclusives’, it is technically an exclusive only in the narrowest of meaning of the word insofar as no other paper considers it to be news. But’s that me just nit-picking.

What really waxed my woody about this particular trivia was that it attempted to make a story out of its readers contempt for GB News. A contempt for which the Guardian, along with some of rest of the media, have only been too happy to create, inflame and generally present GB News as some sort Fox News copycat. If one believed all the negative press that continually engulfs it, one might think that GB News was some kind of emerging powerhouse elbowing its way onto the British media landscape, its audience and influence growing with every passing week.

Except it isn’t. Far from it. For the purposes of this post I tried to find reliable audience figures for GB News – which is harder than one might think – and could find none. Well apart from this one – which is an apology from BARB apologising for woefully inflated viewing figures for New Years Eve – which doesn’t really count. It is however online that GB News comes into its own. Perversely the very media outrage with which the supposedly serious papers treat it, the multiple OfCom complaints made against it, the more people subscribe to its YouTube channel. People are watching GB News, not just in a way , that can be measured using traditional – i.e. outdated – methods

But however many – or indeed few – viewers watch GB News, indeed regardless if one agree’s with it’s avowedly right-wing stance, no matter your disdain for politicians who espouse a particular kind of populism which can become worrying insular, the kind that provokes knee jerk reactions, distrust and suspicion and which may be anathema to you, despite all of this – in fact because of this – if you believe in free speech, then you have to allow it. Free speech isn’t for people you agree with, it only has any meaning at all, if you defend it in support of people you disagree with. It isn’t easy but that’s the point.

But back to the Guardian article and the £660, 000 paid to Tory MPs by GB News since its launch, in June 2021. Just to put that in some kind of context, in that same period, Kath Viner, the editor of the Guardian, trousered nearly £1.5million. She got a £150,000 pay rise in 2022. or 42%. . This is from the same newspaper which see’s no contradiction whatsoever between that and frequently criticising excessive executive pay.

If Guardian readers should be angry about anything, they should be angry about that.