“The toughest job facing the new head of Ofcom: tackling the blatantly partisan GB News”, writes Polly Toynbee in the Guardian.
She writes,
Labour feels more sure-footed. A stronger sense of its own identity flows from standing up to Donald Trump, his war and his insults. MPs are less often looking over their shoulders at the right and its media.
Here comes one test. Selecting a new chair of the media regulator Ofcom is in its final phase: which of two reported frontrunners is appointed will reveal the government’s frame of mind. Ofcom has been moribund, weak to the point of invisibility. One key area is the regulation of online harms, as the government seeks to toughen up on the safety of children and the sanity of the nation, against a libertarian right that defends aggressive notions of free speech, and permits fact-free dangers, such as vaccine and climate denial. Kemi Badenoch is a free-speecher who argued for the weakening of the Online Safety Act in 2022 by removing the ban on “legal but harmful” material for adults, claiming it was “legislating for hurt feelings”. Keir Starmer is strengthening the law by banning addictive algorithms.
and
Try to imagine the revolt on the right if Labour sanctioned an upstart broadcaster with, say, George Galloway as its main nightly presenter (he’d be as good at it as Nigel Farage), a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes. Beyond that scenario, it’s hard to devise a leftist channel as aggressively poisonous as GB News, which pours out Farage, Matt Goodwin, Lee Anderson, Darren Grimes, Martin Daubney and Richard Tice, and is frequently accused of breaking rules about accuracy and impartiality.
Toynbee is right to say that George Galloway could find an audience, but wrong to present the scenario of him being employed by a mainstream outlet as unthinkable. Alongside his work for Iran’s Press TV and Russia Today, Galloway hosted shows for talkSPORT and talkRADIO for several years. But we don’t have to imagine “a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes”, we can see it in Ms Toynbee’s own newspaper, which has been financed by the Scott Trust since 1936. That’s fine by me. I don’t object to “a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes” if it is paid for by a benefactor or by other leftists who like their tropes. I start objecting to a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far left tropes when I am forced to pay for it via my television licence.
It’s almost as if Polly Toynbee cannot fathom how different people have different views, even in a multicultural and diverse population.
Anyone who is against free speech is on the side of the bad guys. These people used to say “I’m in favour of free speech but…” now they have given up all pretence.
You might not “object”, but I hope you’d still grouse about it, at least. Otherwise, they might realize that they could decimate Samizdata.net content simply by ending production! Is there anyone who would want to make that tradeoff?
…
Wow… that’s a lot of hands…
Kemi Badenoch is a free-speecher
My God Britain, how did you get to the point when calling someone a “free speecher” is considered pejorative?
It tells you everything you need to know when her bringing up the idea of Galloway as a presenter as something that would shock his opponents to the point they’d favor restrictions. As if proponents of free speech would object to this. It tells you that she does not even understand what free speech is at the most basic level.
You might not “object”, but I hope you’d still grouse about it, at least.
It is almost as if the correct response to speech you don’t like is expressing your disagreement. Other options, ignoring it, changing the channel, mocking the stupidity of the speaker, getting better friends, agreeing to disagree. All sound just fine to me.
Not to Ms Toynbee. It seems she just does not have the most basic understanding of the idea of free speech.