 Paul Daker is the 72-year-old former editor of The Daily Mail, a paper he edited between 1992 and 2018. Now, Daker at the Mail was a key driver of the country's shift rightward, especially on issues such as immigration and welfare. He was known as this. It was always very well known, very much discussed that Daily Mail was a force dragging the country to the right in the years when he was editor. Let's look at some of the front pages he published over the years. So, in 2013, in the middle of George Osborne's brutal welfare cuts, we can see here vile product of welfare UK. And the sort of language here used about people on benefits is disgusting. Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefit system is guilty of killing six of them. This was obviously after he had killed lots of his kids. I think it was an arson attack and they're associating this with people on welfare. One of the most disgusting, vilifying stories you could put on the front of a newspaper. Also, let's go through some more Daker classics, I suppose you can call them. He was a staunch backer of Brexit. He did more than anyone to turn the issue into a hostile culture war. In 2016, when UK judges found that MPs would need to vote on triggering Article 50, he gave this infamous headline enemies of the people. When May announced the 2017 election, the paper backed her with this headline, crush the saboteurs. And for that same election, this was the front page he put on his paper on polling day. Apologies for terror or the day before polling day. Probably most sickening during his whole tenure was the way the paper talked about migrants. So, you can see here the swarm on our street. So, the most dehumanizing language you can put on the front of a British newspaper. Now, why am I giving you this rundown of the politics of Paul Daker and the influence he has had on British politics? We know that right-wing newspaper editors put right-wing things on their front pages. Well, the reason we're discussing this is because Daker, who is still editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail Group, so no longer editor of the paper, but of the group of the umbrella group, he is apparently in line to chair Ofcom. According to Whitehall and media sources, Boris Johnson is preparing to announce the controversial appointment soon and will later reward Daker with a peerage. The remit will be to target the BBC. And the article goes on. Associates report that he maintains his long held dislike of the big internet platforms. Organizations such as Google and Facebook have effectively destroyed the advertising market that supports the newspapers in his stable. So, we have someone who is more of a role than anyone else in dragging Britain's newspapers to the right, who is now under the prime ministership of Boris Johnson going to be given control, not so much the role of regulating. Ash, I want to bring you in on this. I mean, this is very clearly, I mean, it could almost be seen as a provocation from the conservatives. Maybe what they want is a big culture war about disappointment. But it is also incredibly worrying, right? I mean, if they're putting someone who's such a zealot for right-wing ideas in control of Ofcom, who are a body tasked with sort of ensuring impartiality and ensuring that journalism doesn't become wildly irresponsible, even more wildly irresponsible than it already is. I mean, this is a big and dangerous move, is it not? I mean, I've written about this before, which is the new right of this kind of neoliberalism in one country, Brexit set of head bangers, want to embark on a Gramscian project. So, it's not just about winning an election, even if you win it with an 80 seat majority. It's about taking over civil society as well. That's how you establish a new hegemony. And one of the really key aspects of that is being able to redefine the boundaries of reasonable and respectable opinion. So, trying to redefine where the common sense is. And if you've got one of your people in charge of Ofcom, literally the, you know, arbiters of broadcast impartiality, well, you've gone miles ahead in that pursuit, right? Miles ahead in achieving that goal. So, I really think that you've got to see that within a context of appointing people who are willing to, if they can't transform the institutions of a liberal democracy, then smash them to smithereens. You can also see that with the appointment of David Goodheart to the EHRC, Manira Merza, who was tapped up to head up another inquiry into systematic and structural racism. These are people who don't believe in equalities, who don't believe in the existence of institutional racism. And in a similar vein, Paul Daker doesn't really believe in neutrality. So, you put these figures in these roles to either change what these institutions are meant to do, to transform them into attack dogs for your political opponents, or simply because they are so, you know, ill-fitted to the role, ill-suited to the role, that they completely paralyze the effectiveness of these organizations. In that way, it's a win-win. There's a couple of problems with this potential appointment, not just that he's a rabid right-winger, but also he seems fairly unqualified. So, this is from the Ofcom website in the section What We Do. So, it says, we make sure people are able to use communication services, including broadband. A range of companies provide quality television and radio programs that appeal to diverse audiences. They make sure viewers and listeners are protected from harmful or offensive material on TV, radio, and on demand. And they make sure people are protected from unfair treatment in programs and don't have their privacy invaded, as well as the universal postal service, which covers all UK addresses six days a week with standard pricing. They're there to enforce that and to enforce that the radio spectrum is used in the most effective way. Now, in terms of the issues about treating people fairly, I think the front pages I've already shown you suggest he's not necessarily going to be the most attuned to giving everyone in society a fair treatment. Let's put it like that. The other issue, though, which lots of people are raising is that lots of this involves really technical things. So, he's responsible for making sure people are able to use communication services, including broadband. That means the rollout of fiber optic broadband across the country. Now, Paul Daker is someone who very famously didn't use email, right? So, Boris Johnson is putting in these very powerful authoritative positions, not only people who are politically unsuited to them because they're completely the opposite of someone being politically neutral, but also they're completely unqualified to do it. There's no justification whatsoever to put this guy in this job. He's not qualified and he's not appropriate if you want to support a channel which doesn't put out front pages, which demonize and victimize migrants and people on benefits, and then you can support us at navarmedia.com forward slash support. And just as importantly, you can hit that subscribe button if you are not already subscribed to the show. Tiske Sauer goes live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7 p.m. and we put out videos every day. Ash, I want to go to you now because I know you have an example when it comes to, and again, I'll read out this requirement of OFCOM. We make sure people are protected from unfair treatment in programs and don't have their privacy invaded. That was the fourth point there that you can see. You can also say viewers and listeners are protected from harmful or offensive material on TV, radio, and on demand. I know you've got an example for us of how Paul Dacre in his job definitely took part in activities or published things which did not on most people's understanding, on most people's definitions of the terms, comply to those conditions. Yeah, I want to talk about the case of Lucy Meadows. So this was the case of a transgender woman who tragically took her own life, I think about seven years ago now. She was a teacher and she transitioned while she was in her role as a primary school teacher. In order to explain to the kids that instead of Mr Upton, they would be taught by Ms Meadows, the school sends out a letter to the parents. In general, the response of the parents was very, very supportive and accepting of Lucy Meadows. But there was one parent who lodged a complaint and went to the press. A petition was started to remove her from the school and this was something which was covered in the Daily Mail in a Richard Little John article which I think Fox might be able to flash up for us. It's a really dreadful, awful article, misgendering Lucy Meadows, dead naming her and essentially saying that somebody deserves to be hounded out of their job, a job which they love, a job that they're good at simply because they're transgender. Now the kind of coverage that Lucy Meadows received led to a media scrum outside her house at all hours. She really was utterly hounded and eventually she took her own life. Now at the coroner's inquest, the coroner put blame squarely on the press for contributing to her suicide and the Daily Mail were a part of that. And the reason why I bring that up is because there was outcry at the time. I think the case was also sort of taken up by a hacked off. But other than that, you can kind of see Paul Daker escaping scot-free. There are no consequences for him in public life. He still enjoys the year of those in power. The name of Lucy Meadows hasn't been the albatross around his neck that it really ought to be. And I think when you look at two of the roles that off comma meant to play, one in protecting viewers from harmful or offensive material and then also to make sure that people aren't treated unfairly, his coverage of Lucy Meadows while at the Daily Mail just completely flies in the face of both of those things. It was gratuitously transphobic, gratuitously offensive and treated Lucy Meadows absolutely appallingly. And I think for that case alone, even if the Daily Mail didn't have a history of xenophobic scaremongering, even if it didn't call judges enemies of the people, even if it didn't have a history of smearing and demonizing wealth of their recipients by linking them to a family murderer, this case alone should be excluding for him.