Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

my prediction which will obviously be proven hopelessly wrong by the end of the year or whatever is that GB News is on a hiding to nothing. Sky News has never made money, I don't think. LBC covers the brain worms space, and there isn't really advertising revenue to support a news show in the UK. There's no commercial space for it basically.

Surely making money isn’t the point of any of these ventures, they’re just loss leaders for the policies they will be pushing?

Sir Paul Marshall has cash to burn:

"Hedge fund bosses Sir Paul Marshall and Ian Wace have made more than £50million from the collapse of leisure stocks as the coronavirus outbreak grips London markets."
https://www.winston-fox.co.uk/marshall-wace-makes-50m-on-coronavirus-crash/

Big donor to the leave campaign too

Yeah, the channel's not going to make money, but the growth of the right-wing lunacy industry will make lots of people involved richer in other ways

UK records 1,041 more Covid deaths and 62,322 more cases

i think at some point not making money is a problem in tv, especially if it points to a lack of audience, which would also indicate a key failure of engagement. it is of course possible to make studio based opinion stuff very cheaply, but i don’t see this becoming a fox news vector. tbh that audience is well served already.

discovery certainly won’t want a loss making channel on their books imo.

as a field experiment and also as an act of self-mortification I listened to Times Radio for a few days a couple of months back. They made the BBC look like pros by their constant fluffed links, periods of silence and at one point they broadcasted the ambient noise of a backroom occasionally interrupted by two producers talking to each other for a few minutes, although this was a high point of the entire experience tbf. When they do this shit cheap it really does show.

UK records 1,041 more Covid deaths and 62,322 more cases

676 deaths on the 7-day moving average on Worldometers, up from 500 a week ago.

Oh no not a right wing free marketeer media channel, this is a game changer

"UK records 1,041 more Covid deaths and 62,322 more cases"

And we still got the effects of Xmas to come.

At least no schools and hopefully no unis as well.

Oh no not a right wing free marketeer media channel, this is a game changer

NEW: Gavin Williamson confirms that children without a laptop have been added to the “vulnerable” list who are entitled to go into school, as per below.

Massively expands number able to attend class. Teachers already reporting higher numbers going in than during first lockdown. pic.twitter.com/OXRAcun4tu

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) January 6, 2021

that is god tier shithousery

I, for one, cannot believe this government are, once again, fucking it

kill the poor imo.

As for this channel you have right-wing talking points on all the time across the BBC, and free-speech liberals give that shit air-time all day because they think they will rationally beat it in debate lol. Hedge fund managers spending a bit of spare change.

BREAKING
Nigel Farage and Richard Tice get the green light from the Electoral Commission to rename the Brexit Party as Reform UK.
One of Reform UK's policies is to ease Covid-19 restrictions.
The pair are planning to stand over 1,000 candidates at the local elections this year.

— Christopher Hope📝 (@christopherhope) January 6, 2021

not now lads eh

I think GB News is likely to be anticipating changes from Ofcom too, like allowing political advertising and easing some of the impartiality restrictions.

ah that’s interesting. that was one of the things i was going to call out. didn’t realise they were thinking of changes.

Depends on the new chair, I think. If it's Dacre, then whee.

NEW: Gavin Williamson confirms that children without a laptop have been added to the “vulnerable” list who are entitled to go into school, as per below.

Could conceivably mean that in some instances, half the children are at school and half are at home and teachers might need to be teaching in both realms simultaneously?

i can't see dacre doing it in a million years (another good one to come back to when he's appointed). Put Dacre in a nominally important oversight role for the ongoing telecoms changes, Huawei, OpenReach and 5g governance?

I originally thought Dacre was a spoiler/troll like Moore but by all accounts they were in fact deadly serious about Moore so fuck knows.

I thought a lot of teachers were in both class and virtual class simultaneously, in order to support the kids of key workers ?

sure, but i'm assuming the numbers of pupils in class would've been lower and would've freed up some resource for online teaching. begs the question what students with no access to computing and no right to school attendance have been doing up to now though

(sorry for my hypothesizing, i realise it's of no good use to anyone)

I originally thought Dacre was a spoiler/troll like Moore but by all accounts they were in fact deadly serious about Moore so fuck knows.

― stet, Wednesday, January 6, 2021 7:18 PM bookmarkflaglink

Yeah quite. I didn't realise that about Moore which is just O_o but of course also not.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErFU4fxXEAAFesL?format=jpg&name=large

lol .. the great white hope of the soft left.

guess it's good we're getting our very own fox news huh

The Queen was blameless, the particular combination of jewels she wore constituted Epic Shade towards Trump, there were several of us who Couldn't Even, as I recall

Oh I'm dreading all the right-wing lunatics getting maximum airtime on a daily basis

not that it matters when we have the BBC I guess

Starmer's refusal to back the other old guy was a tacit endorsement of Trump imo

i think at some point not making money is a problem in tv, especially if it points to a lack of audience, which would also indicate a key failure of engagement. it is of course possible to make studio based opinion stuff very cheaply, but i don’t see this becoming a fox news vector. tbh that audience is well served already.

Murdoch's right-wing talking-head cable channel in Australia gets a viewership of 50-70k. Their youtube posts get over 5 million views from conspiracy theorists and headbangers worldwide. The broadcast channel is just to give legitimacy to the influence-peddling.

I realise that the political left does not have the financial resource to compete with this far-right media challenge, but I nonetheless think that the best thing the left can do is to work on building its own media.

with the shouty hyperbole of The Canary and the terfy swagger of The Morning Star!

There are one or two alternatives.

Solidarity with the british gas workers striking for the next 5 days. Fire & rehiring on lower contracts needs to be made illegal

Yup. Just a horror show.

Re: left-wing media. This is what the likes of Novara are doing. Tribune and its networks with Jacobin in the US. It is being formed, it won't get as many figures, but yes it's about who watches it and where do they end up in terms of power.

NEW: Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Frances O'Grady have written to Labour and TUC members urging them to volunteer in the national coronavirus vaccination effort: https://t.co/qz3eNy6XSd

— LabourList (@LabourList) January 7, 2021

Because working for free is what Labour are about now?

Larry Elliott here, he leaves it to Chakrabortty to join the dots on the failures that are coming our way.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/07/boris-johnson-economy-revive-vaccine

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/britain-covid-shot-industrial-base-uk-manufacturing-national-security

There are one or two alternatives.

Novara, New Socialist, Tribune - I like all of these to varying degrees but can't imagine any of them reaching ppl beyond those already onboard.

I misread that Labour call - it's more like campaigning-style volunteering than the "work for the NHS" volunteering I read it as. Starmer is good not bad now.

that would be bad reading because the only way Starmer could be good not bad is if he jumped into a vat of piping hot sulphuric acid!

speaking of bad, another Johnson presser this evening. Haven't seen so much of him in ages

Strong Harold Shipman energy here pic.twitter.com/Mh29Ddelp4

— Alex Christofi (@alex_christofi) January 7, 2021

I think the new left media, though their reach is of course small, do have some influence on opinion. TBH my own views are different now from what they were 4 or 5 years agp, partly as a result of them. Maybe that's true for others, and maybe that filters through somewhere.

It's quite good for political figures - RLB for instance - to engage with them rather than eg the Observer.

Allies of the Chancellor Rishi Sunak say the reason he has been reluctant to argue publicly against opposition demands for increased public spending is that he no longer believes Johnson will resist requests for more cash.

be an idea to make some demands for cash then, eh?