 A new 24-hour rolling news station is launching in the UK later this year. It's called GB News and looks like it will try to aid the success of Murdoch's Fox News in the United States. The project isn't being funded by Rupert Murdoch, however. The major investment partner was US-based network Discovery, Inc., who already have a documentary partnership with the BBC in the UK. They reportedly invested around 20 million pounds. It's now reported that GB News has received 60 million pounds in funding. The rest has come from Dubai-based investment group Legatum and one of the UK's most prominent hedge fund managers, Sir Paul Marshall. We're talking big money here. If you're unfamiliar with these characters, Press Gazette had these details in their write-up of the story. So they're right. Legatum is known for its funding of Fink Tank, the Legatum Institute, which launched in 2007 and became a vocal advocate for Brexit during the 2016 referendum. It also produces the closely-followed annual Prosperity Index alongside investment and research divisions. Sir Paul is the co-founder of Hedge Fund Marshall Waste and was a donor to the Vote Leave campaign. His stake in GB News will be in a personal capacity the company added. The businessman is also co-founder and chairman of ARC Schools, a multi-academy trust of 38 schools and funded political website Unheard. GB News will be hiring 120 journalists plus 20 more support staff and the project will be chaired by former BBC presenter and spectator chairman Andrew Neal. Andrew Neal will also host a prime-time show on the channel. Now of the project Andrew Neal has said, we're thrilled to have such a broad range of high-caliber investors who share our belief that many British people are crying out for a new service that is more diverse and more representative of their values and concerns. GB News is a massive undertaking in a fiercely competitive market, but we're confident there's an appetite for a fresh approach to news in Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Now, you know, £60 million, this is a serious operation, 120 journalists. It's terrifying. GB News is going to have 140 members of staff, 120 journalists for a kind of baseline figure, Unheard, which as you've said is funded by one of the gentlemen behind this now, to the tune of millions of pounds. Unheard initially, the pitch was six to 12 journalists. So we're looking at a really, really big outlet. It's probably going to be on DAB. It's definitely going to be on television. You'll be able to watch it with three of you and so on. And of course, £60 million, a huge amount of money. But I have to say one thing. This is not unique. You've got GB News with Andrew Neal. But you've also got, of course, News UK TV with Rupert Murdoch. They are building the studio as we speak. There's something of a race between News UK TV and GB News. Of course, we've had the launch of Times Radio last year. So you look at Talk Radio, Murdoch. You look at Times Radio, Murdoch. You look at News UK TV, Murdoch. You look at Sky News, no longer News UK, but that's kind of the world it's coming out of. When are we going to start talking about anti-competition law? You look at global, which has classic FM, capital, heart, LBC. This is a company which funds £200 million through tax havens in the five years to 2013. We have a major problem in terms of the media in this country. And it's about to get a whole lot worse. A whole lot worse. All the right-wing outlets are really innovating. So, like I said, the Times, you've got Sunday Times is now becoming a really prestigious, again, I think, high-quality Sunday paper, investigative reporting, and so on, setting the agenda. On the other side of that, in terms of Murdoch's offer, you've got Talk Radio, you've got Times Radio. And I think this is really worrying. You look at the very few legacy progressive left-wing outlets which we have in this country. There's The Guardian, questionable. It's liberal. It's not left-wing. That's just, you know, even that's quite rare. So let's hold that for a moment. There's The Observer and there's The Daily Mirror. These are the three newspapers which right now are innovating the least. You know, The Guardian was doing great work 10 years ago, leading the way. It's kind of lost that advantage. The Observer is dying, frankly, which is a great shame because it's been around since the late 1700s. And The Daily Mirror, I think, will be the first national daily paper to stop of the ones that remain, of course, the independent one a few years ago. So we have big problems. You know, if people think that the media environment in this country was bad in 2016, in 2017, in 2019, wait till 2024, which is why we need to support and fund alternatives. And that's important. And I'm not just saying about GoToNavaramea.com forward slash support. I'm not doing your job, Michael. You know, that... Well, don't do that. Well, I'm not going to steal your lines, your best lines. OK, OK, yeah. But, you know, we clearly need a sustained effort now from the labor movement, social movements, high net worth individuals to back projects. Clearly, right? Look at the voter registration, the deep organizing in Georgia, which is how the Democrats won. Look at the media efforts from the right. We're not doing any of the things that are effective by the right in this country. We're not doing any of the things that are effective with the left or the center in the United States. We're in a really bad way if we don't sort this out. I mean, Navaramea right now with a few other outlets is the exception. You know, I have the fullest confidence. We'll be huge by 2024. Of course. But, my God, we are looking at a lot of operations coming up against the left at the next general election. And I don't think any of our audience will be surprised to know that Navaramea didn't start with 60 million pound seed funding. So we've had to grow much more slowly than you get to do if you are advocating for the interests of billionaires. But we are, I mean, we're delighted at the amount that we have been able to grow, especially over the past year because of all your kind support. If you want to make sure there are left media projects to try and out-compete GB news in these, I mean, they're trying to shift the media further to the right than it already is, a disaster. Then do go to navaramea.com forward slash support. One other thing we should add, the BBC probably isn't going to save you. So these outlets, I think one of their big aims politically at least is to put pressure on the BBC to try and shift to the right. I think people on all sides of politics in this country recognize how much influence the BBC has over political opinion in this country. And I suppose there's been some bad news if you don't want the BBC to be a linchpin of the right in this country. That's because the corporation has unveiled their new chair. He is this guy. I think we can get an image of him up. It is Richard Sharp, who is a former Goldman Sachs banker. Now, whilst Richard Sharp was there, he was the boss of the current chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. He's also spent the past year as an unpaid advisor to Sunak on the economic response to the pandemic, something he's expected to give up to do this new role, not doing a George Osborne, where he manages the evening standard and has all of these advisory jobs on the side. According to the Electoral Commission, Richard Sharp has donated more than 400,000 pounds to the Conservative Party since 2001 and since 2002. He's been a director for the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. Now, this appointment follows the appointment in September of the new BBC director-general, who is Tim Davy. Now, during the 1990s, Davy stood as a councillor for the Conservative Party and was deputy chair of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservatives. So we've got this organizer. You've got Andrew Neal saying the BBC is far too left-wing. That's why we need this new 60 million organisation to drag it in the other direction. Julie Hartley-Bruer railing against the Liberals at the BBC and then in charge of that organisation, we now have, as its chair, someone who has donated 400,000 pounds to the Conservative Party and as its director-general, someone who's literally stood as a Conservative Party candidate. Aaron, it doesn't seem like the BBC is going to be a particularly strong line of defence against this attempt to sort of foxify the British media environment. Yeah, we were talking about this today, in fact, weren't we? And there is an argument to say, well, you know, perhaps it's good that the kind of GB News and News UK TV would act as a kind of leech to suck out the kind of right-wing takes and the ideas. And that's where the Tory politicians would go for interviews and so on. And the BBC could be more centrist. I think that's a compelling argument, but it's clearly not going to happen when you see the people involved. You know, I don't know if you mentioned this a moment ago with Richard Sharp, as well as giving 400,000 pounds to the Conservative Party, which, by the way, some of that money was as recently as December 2019. He's on the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, which is as right-wing as a think tank you will find in this country. And by the way, the wife of Lord Rothermere, who owns the largest media group in this country, who's also a tax dodger and lives in France, is also on the board of the Centre for Policy Studies. You've got about 1,000 people in this country who really do control a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. We don't need to create conspiracy theories around the Illuminati and whatnot. It's just about very affluent people trying to protect and expand their influence in politics, through ownership of the media, so that they become even richer still. Not that tough to understand. We don't need to lunge for COVID conspiracies and pandemics where we can talk about capitalism. I do think there is a relevance of this story about GB News and COVID conspiracies, because what we've been talking about, or what seems to have been accepted right now in the mainstream media, is that the COVID deniers were wrong. Toby Young was wrong. Carl Hennigan was wrong. These people who said, maybe we had herd immunity in summer, maybe the pandemic was already over, maybe lockdowns do more harm than good. They were wrong. The Julia Hartley Brewers of this world, they were wrong. These are the people. These are exactly the people. Yeah, well, Robert Peston was more of a, he just sort of passively reports. Whereas it was Toby Young and Julia Hartley Brewer actively pushing that this is all because of false positives. Whereas Robert Peston is this more sort of like, maybe it is because of false positives. Maybe herd immunity will say it switches every half an hour. But what these channels are gonna do is precisely empower all of the people who were pushing the most disastrous responses to this pandemic and probably do have. I don't really think this is an exaggeration here, blood on their hands, because we know that Boris Johnson has been very, very responsive to these people. It's reported in the FT that he has been throughout this pandemic very, very unwilling to upset people on his back benches. Where do the people on his back benches get their news? From the spectator, from talk radio, from the telegraph, from all of these outlets, which have been saying, oh, maybe we've already got herd immunity, lockdowns are a disaster. They're the people who have been very, very influential when it comes to what policies Boris Johnson has adopted. Because again, he's a bit Peston-like, bit of a sponge, sort of like, I want those people to like me and respect me. So I'm gonna adopt their particular policy platform, even if the evidence behind it is terrible. And we're currently facing the consequences of that. So if you think that Britain's me, your environment as it currently exists has not helped us in damage limitation when it comes to this pandemic, imagine when you've got a mainstream TV channel run by Rupert Murdoch, News UK TV, and a mainstream news channel which is chaired by the person who is also the chairman of the Spectator Magazine, which basically was the house journal of lockdown skepticism. It could have been much worse. And if it happens again in three years time, there's every likelihood it will be if we have someone like Boris Johnson still in power. I mean, when you see these social media videos by Nigel Farage, and of course we've all seen these when he was going to Dover and, you know, Singbaris, Dingy's landing and so on. You know, he's effectively, he's casting here. He wants to be an anchor man, whether it's a GB News or News UK TV, you know, that's clearly where he sees his future. And that's really concerning. You know, we're not that far away from a medium environment where Nigel Farage has an evening TV show, you know, where he's competing for ratings with Piers Morgan. He won't win, of course, because ITVs, you know, it's a big outlet, but let's not forget, you know, it took LBC 20 years to get where it is today. And still, of course, it's not a rival to the big players on broadcast TV, but it's something of an agenda setter. You know, and I think it's important for the left to understand this, you know, the right does not think in terms of six months, one year, two years. They think in terms of 10, 20 years. And I think, you know, yes, this will be terrible in 2024. We will see immediate impacts on the creation of these outlets, but also I just think long term it's going to massively corrupt politics and civil society in Britain. I really do. And I say Britain, because I think the more mainstream this stuff becomes, the more likely it is that Britain will fragment, already priced in my estimation anyway. But it's inevitable. If all of a sudden, Farage and Andrew Neal and Fraser Nelson become not right-wing voices, but kind of, you know, established voices that more and more people are listening to serendipitously, I think that has so many terrible implications for all of us. We have to do something about it.