Tyranny is a sneaky thing. It often scurries in on the back of controversy. It is often when people are angry about something that authoritarians spy an opportunity to take a potshot at liberty. And, boom, before you know it politicians are on TV calling for entire media channels to be shut down.
This is political censorship masquerading as a cry for social justice
This is where Britain is at right now. The speed with which the social-media fury over Laurence Fox’s dumb comments on GB News morphed into a campaign to shut GB News down has been extraordinary. Forget Fox’s broadcasting career – it is media freedom itself that now hangs in the balance.
Of course Fox’s comments were crass and sexist. To judge a woman by her ‘shaggability’ – as Fox did when speaking about the political journalist Ava Evans on Dan Wootton’s show this week – is odious. You’d expect to hear such blather from a gang of teen boys in the pub, not on a supposedly serious news channel.
And yet there have been other comments this week, likewise expressed on live TV, that have offended me more than Fox’s. For example, Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP, who said on Newsnight last night, ‘I think [GB News] should be taken off air’. A politician openly saying a broadcaster should be expunged from the airwaves? Now that deserves a Twitterstorm – or X-storm.
Nokes’s illiberal pondering followed hours and hours of fury on social media over Fox and Wootton and ‘GBeebies’, as the dazzling wits of the Very Online middle class love to call it. There was a deafening clamour for Ofcom to ‘do something’, to get heavy with this sinful news channel, to put the right-wingers out of their misery. The Fox controversy was brazenly used as a soapbox by the authoritarian left to demand the full erasure of this wicked broadcaster.
The political class’s ears pricked up in response to the mob lust for official sanctions against GB News. There was Nokes. There was Gordon Brown, who said Ofcom needs more ‘teeth’ to deal with the likes of GB News. Fox and Wootton ‘have got to be kept off the air’, Brown decreed. ‘This cannot be allowed.’
Allowed. Owen Jones said similar: ‘It is beyond belief that this is allowed to be broadcast.’ What’s beyond belief, to me anyway, is the casual acceptance of the need for a higher power, one with big teeth, to determine what is ‘allowed’ to be discussed in public.
The beefed-up Ofcom that Owen and co. dream of might rap the knuckles of right-leaning, populist channels today, but what if the political wind changes and it decides to clamp down on leftish misinformation? Like, I don’t know, the idea that men can get pregnant or that some women have penises. That’s the thing about giving regulation more teeth: in the future it might just bite you.
Adam Boulton, formerly of Sky News, gave the game away in that Newsnight chat. He said the quiet part out loud. There is a ‘delicate and important broadcast ecology in this country’, he said, and GB News is trying to ‘bust that ecology’. And therefore Ofcom must ‘shut it down’.
There it is. The chilling authoritarian instinct. This isn’t about what Laurence Fox said. This isn’t about confronting sexism. It’s about rapping the knuckles of a news channel, potentially even obliterating it, because it dares to go against the grain of the ‘broadcast ecology’ as defined by the right-thinking media elites.
There is rank opportunism at play. On the muddy foundation of people’s discomfort with Fox’s comments, major players in public life are building their case for closing down GB News entirely. They’re protecting their own cultural clout, their power to shape public opinion via the ‘broadcast ecology’. This is political censorship masquerading as a cry for social justice.
It doesn’t matter what you think about Fox anymore. Or even about GB News (for the record, I think some of it is very good, like Andrew Doyle, and some of it is very iffy). No, all that matters now is what you think about media freedom, that hard-won right of the British people to set up newspapers, publishing houses and broadcasters. We cannot let that liberty go down in the flames of Fox’s GB News career.
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