GB News? What's The Point? I'll tell you what...

I'm very critical of the media as an institution, as are most lefty-do-gooders, and with good reason. Once upon a time, it would've been easy to reason that the purpose of the media was to bring us news, views and investigations into the world around us, and you'd be right to do so.

I do concede though that, to some degree, that is still the case. But the additional role it plays today serves a particular, different purpose and different interests. 

The conversations between journo-hacks on Twitter can be incredibly informative. In these two Tweets where they both self-fellate over the new right-wing GB News channel, neither Hodges nor McGee seem to be aware of this dual purpose of the media. They're not even aware of the role they play, which they assume is simply being a journalist. In their minds, their roles are that of a crusading and self-righteous profession that speaks truth to power. As we know now, nothing could be further from the truth. 

Hodges response to McGee's tweet is particularly revealing. 

"Why is there a gap in the market?", he asks with that sort of faux, shallow intrigue typical of client journalists. He's asked the question, but I doubt he'll meander his way to an answer due in no small part to the role he plays, which, again, he isn't aware of. 

Why Dan, there is no gap in the market! 

Right-wing media saturates our nation, the vast majority of it is loss generating and is paid for by other means, usually from the owner's additional income streams. What does that mean, what's the point in keeping something running if it loses you money? It means that because there is no market incentive, profit, in other words, there must be another type of incentive.

What possible incentive could billionaire, corporate media owners have to launch an overtly right-wing TV channel with boorish and churlish presenters beyond profit? 

What possible value could it have?

Isn't it obvious?

Every anti-capitalist assumes that the owner class, the capitalists, only have one motivation - profit, the singular imperative of capital. But this isn't the case, there are two other motivations. To maintain the supremacy of capital, and hence profit, the owner class must also have political power. The last motivation is social prestige which is afforded through the combination of political power and profit.

To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, if Hodges and McGee believed any differently, they wouldn't be occupying the positions they currently occupy because, in reality, they are both subordinate to the greater interests of capital. They are both, in a way, useful idiots of the established order and the owner class. They aren't investigative powerhouses, although they might occasionally stumble across something they're allowed to publish, they're uncritical regurgitators of establishment propaganda.

A wise man once said: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

And that, folks, is the value of yet another right-wing outlet. It is an expression of cultural hegemony; the conservation of capitalism as it is and nothing more. We're in the end-game of media propaganda - pure saturation. It literally can't do any more than that.

Its purpose is twofold: First to make sure that any gap in the market is plugged and cannot be subverted, and second to saturate every waking moment of our lives with the divisive, nonsense propaganda of the ruling class.

Let's be clear though, the propaganda model of GB News will be more comparable to Fox News than to, say, the BBC. The difference is that the BBC is careful to never knowingly lie by fabricating news. It instead relies on a model of carefully selected and presented information that is depoliticised, distorted and sometimes simply omitted. GB News, on the other hand, will follow that great conservative tradition of presenting opinion as fact and making stuff up to plug the gaping chasms of logic. 

The sole business of the channel will be to regurgitate the same old tripe we've heard time and time again. It'll reinforce prejudices and bigotries and excuse any pushback against either as being "woke", which, let's face it, is just the latest buzz-term for "politically correct" or "Mummy, why aren't the mean lefties letting me be an abject dickhead all the time?". It'll recycle tired conservative platitudes and talking points whilst maintaining a facade of respectability by having a shaved ape with a complexion reminiscent of an angry, anti-woke raspberry indignant at the fact that Muslims now live down the road from him present the channel.

I'm sorry, did I say a shaved ape with a complexion reminiscent of an angry, anti-woke raspberry indignant at the fact that Muslims now live down the road from him? 

I meant Andrew Neil. I always get the two confused.

Speaking of Andrew Neil...

Amazing pseudo-science. This is what GB News viewers have to look forward to.

Everything this channel puts out will be factually incorrect in some way or another, it'll be presented by the worst kind of denialists and pseudo-sceptics, and it'll do its best to somehow make the viewers stupider. It seeks a return to the good ol' days when you could call a spade a spade, a return to when times were simpler and you didn't have to think about modern nonsense such as pro-nouns. It will be, in essence, an expensive IQ point removal service.

The viewers will be those with rose-tinted glasses permanently screwed to their foreheads and they will not see this new channel for what it ultimately is: part of an ever-growing crypto-fascist response to a new world that is struggling to be born. 

Quite honestly, I think the best the left can do about it, at least for now, is to refuse to engage with the channel in its own spaces and starve it of engagement. Quietly block it, ignore it and move on. Your energy is best used elsewhere and more productively.

Tell your friends and family to ignore it as well.

It might save their sanity.