A fresh news television channel is not the solution to our problematic news media

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However, while it may at first delight most of us that the BBC is being challenged, an institution to which most of us feel absolutely no loyalty to, in reality we should probably be more cautious about the plans.’

In a time of great division, the one opinion that surely unites the many is that the way our country approaches reporting our news is utterly unbearable. We seem to have a diversity of news channels, but absolutely no diversity in how our news is reported. This is a result of a horrible combination of two directly opposite bedfellows: state-sponsored Left-wing ideology and free-market forces.

At one time, we had news presenters, now we have “TV personalities”. The influence of the free-market is clearest in measuring their successes by their share of the viewing audience. It seems odd that the reporting of facts should be deemed successful based on measures of consumer demand. Surely the measure of success should be, in reporting objective facts, how accurately these facts are reported?

But therein lies the problem, and where ideology is to blame: the news media no longer believe the news is about the objective reporting of facts. That might be stating the obvious, but it is nonetheless true and the root of the problem with our approach to the news as a country. 

This week’s disastrous episode in which Sky News’ Kay Burley interrogated Health Secretary Matt Hancock over Tony Abbott’s potential appointment to a top international trade position was a case in point. Her question to Hancock, in which she asked whether Abbott should get a top job “even if he is a homophobe and a misogynist” assumes those labels are objective. They aren’t. The evidence that Abbott is a misogynist, for example, is based on his labelling of his political opponent Julia Gillard as a “witch”. This is an extreme assumption to assume that his (somewhat rude) criticism of one woman can be equated with hatred of all women, and certainly not one we can objectively prove.

For all our news media’s emphasis on diversity, there is absolutely none when it comes to this kind of ideology that drives them. On any news channel, any interview with key figures behind events becomes a confrontation of acceptability, a test of whether this politician conforms to left-wing values that the “TV personalities” subscribe to.

All this turgid drudgery passed off as “news” makes it completely understandable that some will be glad to hear of a rival news channel being proposed. According to the proposal, the GB News channel aims for a launch in February 2021, and plans to compete with the BBC and its “woke” approach to the news.

However, while it may at first delight most of us that the BBC is being challenged, an institution to which most of us feel absolutely no loyalty to, in reality we should probably be more cautious about the plans.

Of some concern is GB News’ sales pitch of being a “Fox News-style outlet” designed to rival the “wokeness” of the BBC. If the problem with our news media is a lack of objectivity, it seems that to support its creation with its own ideological underpinning is wrong; an ideological goal of anti-wokeness is also not objective. 

Worse than that, its competitive nature of rivalling the ‘woke’ clearly shows the mindset of seeing the news as an endeavour to be a business in just another competitive market. Its success seems to be very much determined by the gap in the ‘market’ it meets and not the objectivity of its reporting. In other words, it seems to be no better than its rivals in aiming for real objectivity in its reporting.

The print media, so often championed as a ‘free press’, is in reality very far from it. Our newspapers have been strangled by the free-market dominance of press barons, interested not specifically with reporting the news but often by their desire for comfortable relationships to the government of the day. A socially conservative opinion is scantily found among even the most Tory of the so-called ‘Tory press’. The cause is, at least in part, this desire to ‘fill the gap in the market’ rather than objectively report the facts.

I predict that before long this ‘objective’ news channel, if it launches, will soon suffer from what bewails its rivals, the cult of personality surrounding its presenters, not to mention political pressure to conform to social liberalism print media have already succumbed to. Sacrificing the issue to the altar of the free-market is not the solution, it is in fact the acceleration of our media’s decline. 

Until we accept that the free-market is not a neutral force but facilitates Left-wing ideology we will not touch the surface of the ideological corruption of our news, and forever be condemned to its drudgery.