Ok so I left Britain more than 15 years ago and have been living in Norway, blissfully unaware of what’s been happening. I recently went back to visit family, where I notice that my dad’s had a bit of a swing to the right, politically speaking. At some point he put on gbnews.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!?
How popular is this blatant propaganda?
It’s an entertainment channel, that happens to have “news” in it’s name. So not subject to news rules. So it can have Tory MPs as presenters interviewing other Tory MPs as guests.
That OK isn’t it? Not remotely dishonest and unbalanced…
They will get shutdown soon enough for this dishonest nasty stuff. Or, as they will say, “silenced by the woke main stream for telling the truth”. It’s kind of what they want.
It had very poor viewing/listening figures for quite a long time, and was generally seen as a bit of a joke, but they’ve been growing alarmingly in the last year - though still comparatively low.
If you see a report saying “GB News hits 1 million viewers”, note that this was corrected a few days later to “actually it was only 33,000”.
So currently, it’s generally not trusted or respected, and is kind of seen as a joke, but like UKIP, Brexit, Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, Donald Trump as US President etc, it’s a dangerous joke that we should be taking more seriously.
As a dumb American, it’s part of a continuing trend to support global fascism through batshit right-wing media outlets. Anything Murdoch owned and “other”. Here, it’s mutated into webcasts and twitter/“other” social media platforms, but the goal is always the same: Spin, deflect, gaslight, lie, deny, and keep oligarchs in power damn the cost. It’s ridiculously effective and very cheap, relatively speaking.
What you’re describing happened to all our friends and family in the late 90’s / early-2000’s.
See also: Australia, New Zealand, India, France, Germany, Ital- well, Italy might be organic, who knows ;)
Also not helped by gammons migrating to the sunnier bits of europe, then talking about how GB news has it right.
So people in european countries get Barry, 60, as their reference for UK media, making it look more legitimate.Sadly, when I fix apps on my dad’s tablet, I notice he has YouTube subscribed to GBNews. I have to avoid any political discussion with him as he has gone down the rabbit hole and repeated many crazy theories which I debunk immediately, but I don’t think he believes me.
- Are you middle aged and unsuccessful?
- Do you blame every problem in your life on foreigners and immigrants?
- Want to have fear mongering propaganda blasted into your brain all day?
If so, youll love GBNews!
So how big of a problem is it?
Not a huge one yet, it’s mostly the already-gone daily mail brainworms lot that watch it.
But it has every intention (along with Murdoch’s talktv) of being as much of a tumour on our society as fox news is in the states.
I think we need another round of stopfundinghate
It also feels like a way to funnel bribes to politicians in plain sight, by paying them massive sums to rant at a camera with barely anyone watching
GB News has paid Conservative MPs more than £660,000 in appearance fees and salaries since it launched, against just £1,100 to Labour MPs, Guardian analysis shows.
