Mapping the British Media
The media in Britain is “a raging furnace of right-wing provocation, spitting out lies, fear and spite, shaping a political culture of miserliness and insularity”.
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The descent of the media in this country, and of wider public discourse has been a running theme of this publication for over a decade. The recent failure and flop of new far-right broadcasting projects, despite vast sums of money being poured into them is not the subject of celebration. Talk TV and GB News have been disasters, but some have argued this is not because their views are out of line, but because their views are everywhere.
In 2022 Nesrine Malik, author of We Need New Stories chartered the phenomenon of the failure of what she called the rightwing media ‘swamp’. GB News lost half its value since it launched. Ratings for Piers Morgan’s Talk TV are pitifully low. Malik explains why this is not a triumph:
“The repositioning away from ratings to views, despite the former securing advertising, suggests that the entire model of right-wing TV is adjusting its course from commercial viability to sustainable loss, with the payoff being prominence in the discourse. The bad news is that this model is floundering not because there’s no appetite for inflammatory, opinion-based news. It’s because there’s too much. In fact, the appetite is so huge that it feeds off, and is fed by, the very mainstream media that these channels thought they were differentiating themselves from. The rightwing media swamp isn’t any less fertile. It’s full.”
Malik’s analysis is essentially right; this is a monoculture, “a raging furnace of right-wing provocation, spitting out lies, fear and spite, shaping a political culture of miserliness and insularity”.
Bringing this right up to date, Peter Geoghegan writes (‘We need to talk about Paul (Marshall)’: “Last week, GB News hit the headlines, after its latest company accounts showed massive losses at the right-wing broadcaster. But tucked away on the final page, in the section marked ‘related party transactions’, was a remarkable detail: GB News owes more than £117million to All Perspectives Ltd.”
“Who, or what, is All Perspectives Ltd? It’s GB News’s parent company—owned by, among others, hedge fund multi-millionaire Sir Paul Marshall.”
Paul Marshall is a remarkable individual who owns Unherd, The Spectator and, Geoghegan hints may be eyeing up The Telegraph. He funds a network of right-wing think-tanks and has plowed hundreds of millions of pounds into influencing British politics.
Last year I wrote:
“We have put some community notes on Andrew Neil’s hilarious resignation letter as Hedge-fund christian multi-millionaire Paul Marshall builds his far-right media empire by buying The Spectator. As Politico magazine explains the background: “In 2017, he launched UnHerd, a web-based magazine with a private members’ club attached that is based conveniently on Old Queen Street, between the House of Commons and Conservative party HQ. UnHerd was initially edited by the former Times comment editor Tim Montgomerie, a friend who shares Marshall’s Christian faith.”
So he’s gone from being owed £83.8 m to £ 117 million. Not that he cares. He, like others with deep pockets, buy influence on a huge scale.
“Marshall stepped down as chair and trustee of Ark Schools last April, after the campaign group Hope Not Hate reported that his locked X account, @aeropagus123, had repeatedly liked or reposted far-right, homophobic and Islamophobic tweets. One of the tweets Marshall endorsed, according to Hope Not Hate, said that Muhammad was ‘one of the worst men to ever live’; another declared: ‘If we want European civilisation to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately.’ He also retweeted a post that appeared to group homosexuality with ‘worshipping Satan, evil [and] corrupting children’.
It goes on.
Geoghegan writes: “Over time, Marshall’s donations have become more political, aided by the UK’s capacious definition of charitable good. The Sequoia Trust (his personal charity) has given £890,000 to Policy Exchange, the influential conservative think tank where Rishi Sunak once worked. Policy Exchange doesn’t disclose its donors, or what it does with their money, but Marshall’s contributions coincided with its production of a number of papers and projects devoted to culture-war issues such as free speech in universities, which were often cited approvingly by Conservative government ministers. In 2022 Sequoia gave £18 million to Ralston College, a private, unaccredited liberal arts college in Savannah, Georgia. Ralston has just seven academic staff and a handful of students; its chancellor is the psychologist and self-styled ‘professor against political correctness’, Jordan Peterson. Marshall’s son, Winston, has given guest lectures at the University of Austin in Texas, a new university that claims to focus on free speech and the ‘fearless pursuit of truth’. Until 2021 he was a member of the folk-rock band Mumford & Sons; he quit following the backlash to the tweet he posted praising the book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by the right-wing social media personality Andy Ngo. ‘Winston being cancelled is a big part of why Paul is the way he is now,’ someone who works in Marshall’s media empire told me.”
It’s why shaping alternatives, like this, under-resourced but determined outlet (and dozens elsewhere) is more important than ever. It might feel like a pointless exercise in the face of such dark money and power, but an alternative media does exist.
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I had a brief moment of hope earlier today when I noticed that the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail had “Class War” as its headline.
Sadly, it was about unruly pupils rather than the Mail having worked it out…
Everyone who doesn’t follow the Neo-Marxist, post-modernist critical theory social groupthink, is “Far-right”.
It’s critical thinking that essential not critical theory.
If this morning GBNews reports that a record 3000 illegal immigrants landed in small boats, yet the Guardian doesn’t.
Are GBNews wrong to report it ir The Guardian not wrong for not reporting it?
Is it not the case that the graduate elites favour censorship because they believe the non-graduate masses are incapable of reasoning out where the truth lay.
Who is the more vulnerable to indoctrination?
1. The University graduate who has been immersed in a group which prioritizes DEI, critical race theory, critical decolonisation and are taught by an institution that comprises almost 100% left-wing tutors?
2. The working class young person who may be exposed to woke ideology at school, but lived in an apolitical world dominated by his friends, family, football, and a wide range of experiences that isn’t politically based?
Are you left wing graduates who believe that only you know best as guilty of elitism as any number of these rich right wing proprietors?
Because the working classes choose to believe something different from you it doesn’t make it wrong or the work of the rightwing press. It means that they have rejected your view if the world. Their problem is that graduate elites control the establishment.
How many of you are afraid to challenge the consensus of your social or professional group? Even when you know it to be wrong?
I guess it was when I was beaten weekly at my new high-performing school that I realized that there was a privileged class who didn’t want working class scum like me contaminating their nice environment.
I say “scum” because that is what a black middle class sports teacher called me when he encouraged my “classmates” to show me what they thought of me. Just before he left the changing room, that it is.
Elites are always the same, regardless if whether they are left or right wing.
The left wing have broken the balance, and it’s once more down to the working class to restore it. I don’t mean what today is called “Centrist”, for that is liberal-left by another name.
Enjoy the path back to sanity.
Yay! The Graduate Elites are back!
@Nazi Steve, your rebranding as ‘Centrist Steve’ (aren’t all narcissists Centrists?) makes much the same appeal to rationality as your noble declaration that you would love to die for your country to save it from performative virtue-signalling. Perhaps if you knew your history, you’d understand woke to be anti-indoctrination, but hey.
Perhaps the bigger story was this skirmish in the War on Nature:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/north-sea-ship-collision-foul-play-technical-fault-or-human-error
If you think that GB News makes sense, what sense did it make of that?
I’ve watched the acclaimed documentary The Missing Picture (2013) which covers the extreme anti-intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge, responsible for the Cambodian Genocide (1975 to 1979), and what they did to their graduates (though they didn’t stop there):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Picture
Because it uses models and dioramas as well as footage, it may be more accessible to viewers who might find, say, Jon Pilger’s documentaries too distressing. I suspect there is some selectivity for a Western audience (it’s a Cambodian-French production).
Despite the heavily-armed camps of the Cold War projecting military force around the globe, it was the Vietnamese who ended the Khmer Rouge regime. Aside from a familiar ideology of xenophobic purity, the Khmer Rouge seemed to be targeting anyone who kept cultural memory alive; similar to the Romans killing off the druids, I guess, the graduate elite of old Britannia.
Stevie H – your posts read like a right wing nutjob parody account.
Perhaps this is a career you could pursue- you certainly make me chuckle.
Thanks
Puir wee soul!
Robert Reich has recentluy written about the ‘crackdown’ (euphemism) on US campuses:
“The real reason Trump and the Republican Party are cracking down on universities is their belief that universities are dominated by the left.
As I’ve noted, JD Vance (Yale Law ‘13) has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities” — giving universities “a choice between survival or [being] … much more open to conservative ideas.”
Yet whether you like or dislike what’s said at universities, free speech is at the core of our democracy, and protecting it should be one of the core missions of universities.”
@Editor, but that’s a ridiculous framing. It’s the Conservatives in the USA who are ideologically bent, whether by white Christian nationalist supremacism or one of their other brands of worship (Mammon etc), on imposing ideology on universities, not about introducing ideas. Their real fear is scientists, not Marxists. You can see that in the recent purges. They want a flattering glass, not an accurate mirror. They cannot stand the sunlight of objective reality.
For all its therapists the USA is so screwed up, for all its lawyers so disrespectful of the rule of law, for all its technology so backward, for all its medics a cultivator of disease… the USA is an incontinent, senile old man wearing the world for his nappy. And there is no miracle cure for that.
What’s a ridiculous framing?
I think you maybe have misunderstood me, or Reich, or something?
@Editor, from the quote, Vance’s framing, and Reich for apparently taking Conservative ideologues at face value (a reference or link would have been helpful). Scientists (shorthand for those professionally exploring objective reality) are not ‘the Left’. And a lot of educational damage happens long before students arrive at university.
Again, there’s a kind of dumb worship of ‘free’ speech rather than an appraisal of what is good speech, how constructive and deductive conversations can be carried out, how to progress knowledge and wisdom, when to give way and let someone else speak, the ethics of speech etc. I appreciate the Bella has some ‘good speech’ principles, not least as a corrective to corporate media.
It never fails to give laugh when the likes of Marshall go on about saving European civilization!
Indeed
Thank you Mike for making Bella such a great forum!
How do you convince people like SteveH above that millionaires/billionaires tend not to have the best interests of the working class at heart?
It seems like humiliation, shame and fear are somewhere in the mix. As well as burning anger and a desire for revenge.
@Wul, well, it’s the propaganda of flattery, the appeal to self-love that even solipsists can relate to. Narcissism, which occupies a space in the L*G*B*T constellation, though that N-word may be commonly overlooked for representation. You are of the chosen people, you are the hero in your own story, you are the enlightened one, your personal ‘truth’ trumps the collective. Maybe Nazi Steve desires that magic mirror that says “You are of the Master Race!”
One of the most dangerous kinds of ideology is that which promises absolution. That whatever evils you have done, can be washed away by authority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolution
Crusades of many kinds (not just literally Christian of course) have employed this. Accountability is for lesser mortals. And you have to understand the scale of these evils to see the connection with the appeal of such ideologies (the BBC documentary Hunting the Online Sex Predators is one place to start; one can only imagine that cutting foreign aid will drastically reduce the number of British offenders — mostly men — caught by cooperation with foreign police forces). It’s easy to call for more law and order if you think it won’t apply to you.
sick in body & in brain
they’re all lying that say I’m sane
when we destroy any good we had,
indulge in everything bad,
the last refuge of the mad
I was listening to Bernard Ponsoby & Alex Massie podcast reviewing Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy after she announced she was standing down as MSP. Some comments I agreed with and some I didn’t which is fair enough. They did mention misogyny but they never mentioned how the overwhelming majority of printed media in Scotland was hostile to her, SNP and independence. Mainstream media people in Scotland have a natural assumption/bias when it comes to independence (and by connection SNP) but they will go to their grave protesting that they are impartial.
Am I wrong in thinking that all opinions should be able to have public expression? Is that wrong?
I read SteveH’s post here and it didn’t seem that bad to me, it’s just an opinion. Working with the elderly I am exposed to a lot of ideas that many today would find ‘outmoded’. I have one man in his early eighties who says he feels lonely because he has no one he can talk to. He enjoys our conversations because he is able to express his opinions – which are fairly traditional English views covering the Union, immigration and Britain’s unique place in the world as a nuclear power. He is very conservative (Powelesque) and although we do not agree on even one thing (I’m socialist and Yes supporter) he enjoys the chance to express himself. At 82, on his own and in poor health his quality of life is pretty poor. When he speaks to others his opinions are deemed ‘unacceptable’. Should any politically based views really be deemed unacceptable? Is unacceptable a word we should even use? If you turn back twenty or thirty years his views would probably still fit within the mainstream. I think we adopt far too much of Americana into our own discourse – politics in the UK and the US have become enmeshed. The fact that people such as, say, Vance use the term ‘free speech’ to rile up the public manipulatively in order to then enact harsh policies should not be used to shut down other people’s views.
Free speech really does mean that views we vehemently disagree with must be given room for expression. Offensive speech is something different and I think is covered by existing laws.
I don’t use social media, I don’t watch television or stream it and I think the temperature of debate is much higher amongst those who do. I can’t understand the bile that goes on. There seems to be so much negativity. I think it is the platforms themselves that heat debate and not necessarily the views. I’m sure that if standing next to someone in a pub having an exchange of views (such as I have with this elderly man) would be more respectful, probably more profound, than encapsulated in a limited number of words, even on blogs conversation becomes heated because typing takes time so sentences are trunkated and as such seem curt which leads to curt responses and so on.
Is it really the people who are becoming more right wing? Or for that matter the media? Haven’t the UK newspapers and TV always been – in the main – leaning to the right? Wasn’t there quite an aggressive reaction to Wilson’s governments? Weren’t the stereotypes of Scots – tight, aggressive, drunk, Irish – untrustworthy, violent, drunks, Welsh – sleazy, peeping toms and stupid, in BBC dramas rather right wing?
Myself, I find disappointment in my own responses BTL on blogs as they often read back as curt and aggressive as I usually write quick comments.
We have to try to listen to each other not shut each other down. Convince by arguement and share ideas.
WT – there is a difference between conversing with someone in a work environment and on a discussion forum. I had interactions with patients who expressed racist views but in work basis I would not contradict (or agree with) them because my role was to care for them. If the same person engaged me in public with racist views I would inform them that I didn’t agree with them.
The editor publishes Stevie H views on his site and if he was trying to suppress his views he would not publish his comments. Many other commentators do not agree with Stevie H views and express this view as well. This is free speech in practice surely. I am sure if I published a left wing comment on a right wing website I would receive some very hostile responses.
I agree with you that the media has always been predominantly hostile to left leaning politicians and I would add independence supporting politicians. I also agree that social media has heightened divisions in society but from my experience these divisions were always there. Perhaps the lack of interaction between individuals on a social basis has heightened this division?
Keep up the good work caring for elderly and infirm.
@John, within workforces (despite Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to destroy it and replace it with managerialism) a professional ethos is commonly thought to be upheld (not just in professions).
More specifically, codes of professional ethics can be defined by statute or contract and enforced by state or corporation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_ethics
And there are many cases of this enforcement happening, although also some disputes. And probably many organisations which fail to live up to these kinds of standards, which is why the BBC seems to be such a hotbed of misogyny, to take a media example, if the rot is in senior management.
SD – from my experience the standards of behaviour come from various sources:
1)Internal – this is personal, inculcated when young and often influenced by role models and prevailing culture.
2)professional standards – this can sometimes lead to conflict with overbearing management.
3)peer pressure
4)organisational standards and ethos – this is highly dependent on senior staff within organisation leading by example.
With regard to BBC from outside it appears that problems have arisen from highly paid stars within organisation whose behaviour has not been challenged. Contrast that with Alex Ferguson at Man Utd who shipped out stars who were no longer performing for the greater good of team.
@John, in Blood Lust, Trust and Blame (2021), Samantha Crompvoets makes a distinction between climate (can be local, change quickly, be set by new leaders) and culture (which often emerges from out-of-hierarchy power which hides the real decision-makers). But to change ethos requires going beyond culture, writing that polished presentations wilt in face of culture change backlashes; consultants and politicians may like the big transformative programs, but these often fail to deliver, frustrated by only targeting formal hierarchies of assumed power.
I think our Anglo-imperial culture is so steeping in hypocrisy and cant that it is generally expected that leaders will behave badly in private but talk up virtue in public. I reject the right-wing Great Man (Occasionally Woman) View that underpins the Cult of Leadership, although conspicuously bad leadership does have an effect.
As for the BBC, I don’t think you’ve been following the same stories as I was thinking of, which are about the culture of misogyny in management (which they deny, even as they apologies for not protecting female staff, and reach out-of-court settlements with others). Of course the culture of BBC senior management has long reflected the culture of MI5 who vetted recruitment to the organisation. It’s possible that MI5 make the Met look like ardent feminists by comparison; perhaps we’ll uncover more in due course.
But I think you are correct about various sources of ethos and clashes (as BBC journalists are finding in their manager’s support for Israel).
“Am I wrong in thinking that all opinions should be able to have public expression?”
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