The delusions of a GB News co-owner
I watched an interview with one of its investors so you didn’t have to.
Paul Marshall gets all the headlines, but he’s not the only backer of the radical right-wing broadcaster (and financial sinkhole) GB News.
Marshall, a billionaire hedge fund manager, has been accompanied in the venture by the Legatum Group – a Dubai-based investment firm that is a key sponsor of “culture war” groups in the UK.
I won’t do the full chapter-and-verse on Legatum (you’ll have to subscribe to find out more), but the group has helped to fund the pro-Brexit Legatum Institute think tank, the Restore Trust (which is waging war on the National Trust), and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship – a weird global think tank fronted by Jordan Peterson and also backed by Marshall.
I’m focusing on Legatum today because one of its partners Mark Stoleson has been getting some attention on BlueSky (you should hop on the BlueSky bandwagon if you haven’t already; it’s great).
Stoleson gave a YouTube interview to The Telegraph a few months ago, interrogated by one of the giants of journalism, Steven Edginton (sarcasm intended).
Aside from being one of Stoleson’s future employees at GB News (he was hired soon after conducting the interview), Edginton used to be a press officer at Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (now Reform UK), before working for The Sun, and the hard-right blog Guido Fawkes. A glittering CV.
I’m going to save you from watching the interview by summarising the most interesting/worrying bits (what we would call “the top lines”, in the media business), before fact-checking some of Stoleson’s more ridiculous comments.
I spent most of the 45-minute interview shouting at my computer screen, so buckle up.
The Top Lines
GB News is influencing other broadcasters
Stoleson claimed to possess evidence that GB News has shifted major broadcasters to the right.
Asked whether GB News has changed the media landscape in Britain, Stoleson said:
“We don’t just try to guess. We actually have people that are looking at that full-time using computers to analyse every spoken word on the BBC, on Sky, on ITV, to try to assess [whether] the GB News conversation is changing the broader national conversation. We’ve got data to support that, yes.”
In other words, GB News has radicalised other broadcasters, including our national broadcaster, the BBC. Scary stuff – though not entirely surprising, when you remember that BBC board member Robbie Gibb (a former Tory advisor) helped to set up GB News (seriously).
Legatum is playing the long game
Despite being a fan of the free market (more on that later), GB News isn’t very successful in the free market.
The broadcaster has lost more than £75 million since its launch in the summer of 2021 – enough money to pay for a pretty good Premier League footballer.
So, there has been plenty of speculation that Marshall and Legatum won’t be able to stomach the losses for much longer. Marshall has even withdrawn from the GB News board, and now seems more occupied with his latest plaything, The Spectator (which he snapped up for a cool £100 million in the summer).
However, apparently Legatum has money to burn.
Stoleson said: “From an investor’s perspective, GB News is here to stay. It has the funding that it needs. It’s got the mission that it needs, and it’s got the audience.”
He added: “We’re playing the long game here. We knew from the outset that this wouldn’t be an overnight success.”
So GB News isn’t going anywhere soon. Oh goodie.
Stoleson’s Delusions
So now we come to Stoleson’s delusions.
Deep breath.
Stoleson’s claim:
“For something that just was an insurgent bootstrap, startup kind of venture, GB News has done an amazing job in the last three years.”
The reality: GB News is not a bootstrap venture. It has received at least £120 million in funding from its financier investors. GB News is a bootstrap venture in the same way that the Ritz is a B&B.
Stoleson’s claim:
“In contrast with other channels that get subsidised by the state, GB News has its audience trying to subsidise us.”
The reality: See above. GB News is subsidised by its billionaire investors. If the free market had been allowed to do its stuff, it would have gone bust a long time ago.
Stoleson’s claim:
“From a Legatum perspective, with our our overarching goal to promote prosperity, we want to see debate; we want to see freedom of speech, but we’d also like to see an elevated discourse. We don’t want to see ad hominem attacks; we don’t want to see people rubbishing other people.”
The reality: This one nearly made me spit out my soup. GB News specialises in ad hominem attacks. I watched a short clip yesterday documenting just a few of the occasions when GB News presenters have called Ed Miliband an “eco fanatic”. Reform MP Lee Anderson hosts a show during which a progressive commentator is sat in a dark alcove (“left in the corner” they call it) while the other guests heckle them from afar. One GB News guest recently called Islamophobia an “entirely invented concept” while questioning the Britishness of Muslim MPs.
I don’t know what station Stoleson is watching, but it can’t be GB News.
The final delusion is from Edginton. He suggested that the failed actor Lawrence Fox was fired as a GB News presenter for saying something “silly” about a female journalist.
The reality: Fox was fired was saying the following about journalist Ava Evans:
“We’re past the watershed so I can say this… show me a single, self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman… ever… ever.
“That little woman has been fed... spoon-fed oppression day after day after day, starting with the lie about the gender pay gap.
“She’s sat there, and I’m going like, if I met you at a bar and that was like sentence three, chances of me just walking away are just huge.
“We need powerful, strong, amazing women who make great points for themselves. We don’t need these feminist 4.0. They’re pathetic and embarrassing.
“Who’d want to shag that?”
Were these statements “silly”, as Edginton claims, or vile misogyny? I’ll let you decide.
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