If pouring more cash into a channel where the average daily viewing is less than a minute sounds like a waste of money, then spare a thought for those paying for Piers Morgan’s reported £50m deal with Talk TV. Ratings were comically low. “Morgan went from Good Morning Britain to Good Evening Nobody,” Slate said. Other big names fared no better. Earlier this year, Tom Newton Dunn didn’t register a single viewer for his half-night show. Having positioned themselves as challengers to the mainstream channels that cater to limited viewing, both channels have now focused on telling us that they are not really into ‘linear TV’ at all, creating a new world of ‘content TV’. ,” in which no one watches the TV show anymore and instead scrolls through her clips on social media. Except those who no longer watch TV channels don’t want to follow them on social media either. Talk TV has 83,000 followers on TikTok, less than your average “this is what I ate in a day” account. The shift from ratings to views, despite previously securing advertising, suggests that the entire model of right-wing television is adjusting its course from commercial viability to sustainable loss, with reward dominating the conversation. The bad news is that this model is faltering not because there is no appetite for inflammatory opinion-based news. It’s because there are too many. In fact, the appetite is so huge that it feeds and is fed by the very mainstream media from which these channels thought they were diversifying. The right-wing media swamp is no less fertile. Is full. Piers Morgan interviews Donald Trump on Talk TV, April 2022. Photo: Piers Morgan Uncensored/Talk TV Just look around you. If you like immigrant abuse, then some of our tabloids are the best in the business. So well, in fact, that they have attracted international attention, being condemned by the UN for, in the case of a column in the Sun by Katie Hopkins in which she referred to migrants as ‘cockroaches’, reflecting an ‘evil background of racism that characterizes the debate about immigration in a growing number of EU countries’. If you’re looking for some incitement against civil servants, judges and MPs on behalf of ‘the will of the people’, the Daily Mail has you covered. If you’re an altogether more sophisticated reader, broadsheets can provoke the market’s fury in a more subtle form. The Times will carry out an ‘audit’ of UK universities by making almost 300 freedom of information requests, discover that a total of two books have been removed from reading lists and bring you an ‘exclusive’ dive saying that ‘universities have started removing books from reading lists to protect students from ‘challenging’ content’. See what they did there? Technically true, your honor. And anyway, who needs televised talk when you have dial-up radio? The thriving medium that gave Hopkins, Maajid Nawaz, Julia Hartley-Brewer and of course Nigel Farage a platform. There is no refuge from the swamp: its waters embrace your feet even as you seek higher ground. This last bastion of “impartiality”, the BBC, has removed any sense of responsibility and reduced it to gullibility, treating almost all positions as if they were of equal value and allowing funded interests to promote their version of reality. The result is a capture by rampant right-wing think tanks and the indulgence of climate crisis deniers. But it is the revolving door of “talent” that is the greatest gift of a wider ideological consensus. People travel, without missing a beat, between these media houses, between literary publishing in the Sun to literary supplements, or between the BBC and GB News and then Downing Street. It’s an entire ecosystem, one that constantly masks its uniformity with claims of censorship and cancellation, with the likes of John Cleese presented as rebellious misfits in a blandly sterilized monoculture. They are right about the monoculture part, but it is not “woke” or incompetent. It is a raging furnace of right-wing challenges, spewing lies, fear and hatred, shaping a political culture of avarice and insularity. People look to the media not just for information, but for a moral compass, and that needle is currently pointing in one direction: away from a world of equality and shared resources. The result is that the destructive dominance of the right is promoted and maintained beyond its natural termination point, even as the catastrophic scenarios that the Tories foresee under a Labor government arrive in motion. The lights will literally go out and the Telegraph will tell you that power cuts create character. So the value of GB News can be halved or decimated for all that matters. It’s just another home for the harmful positions and people that already inhabit our politics, rather than the harbinger of a radical new frontier I feared it had the potential to be. His difficult task was not to challenge the mainstream media, but to differentiate himself significantly from it. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words via email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
