 fledgling right-wing TV channel GB News has been in a spot of bother since launching a month ago. Andrew Neil has run off on holiday. He's exasperated by technical problems. No one knows when he's coming back. Last week, viewing figures hit zero and they've recently had a presentified for taking the knee cancelled by a right-wing boycott from their own viewers to try and resolve the problem. They've hit the Nigel Farage button. Farage will be presenting an hour-long show on weeknights. The Observer had these details. This is about GB News in general. The new channel is facing plummeting viewing figures and a split in management between those angling to keep broader-based regional news coverage and those planning to boost coverage of the culture wars. And if a bigger helping of Farage is not enough to entice audiences, another famous potential saviour could be on hand soon. Piers Morgan, who left Good Morning Britain in March, may step into a high-profile role on the new TV channel. Morgan 56 is in protracted negotiations with management, but must first deal with his contractual ties to ITV. That's a very interesting story. I mean, there's a couple of elements here, Ash. One Nigel Farage has come to the show over the weekend. Andrew Neil sort of tweeting all of these things about how Nigel Farage says stuff about evidence. So now for him to be the chair of the channel and have Nigel Farage come on board all seems a little bit odd. This idea that Piers Morgan would go there, would he flee to this sinking ship? People would do pretty much anything if you wave enough money under their nose. And so I think the key things are, would the technical difficulties be tightened up and dealt with before they attract another big-name broadcaster like Piers Morgan? And can they tempt him with both promise of having a large enough audience share a really good social media game and a bountiful payslip, which could get him lowering himself to this glorified teletext channel? I don't know. I don't know. But I think for Nigel Farage, it's a move that makes sense. He's no longer on LBC. And he's somebody who really has, I think, throughout the entirety of his career as a politician, really relied on having that main line into broadcast news media. I think that's been like a core component of his strategy. He's the kind of person who, you know, if he was asked to go on Love Island, he'd have been popping up in Casa Remor to talk about the horrors of immigration. He's an opportunist. And this is, I think, for all of its constraints and all of its hiccups since launch and opportunity for Farage, I do still think that GB News faces some existential challenges. And they're ones which, I think, go a lot deeper than just criminal camera work and lighting. I mean, I swear to God, if anyone in Navarra lit me that badly, I would have absolutely burnt the organization to the ground by now, like really dreadful work. But all those things, I think, can be straightened out just with money, time and professionalism. They need to replace the awful robot cameras with ones actually staffed by humans. You could have, like, nicer lighting. So you don't make Mercy Muroki, who, yes, I believe is an agent of evil, but let's face it, the woman has got glowy, luminescent skin. Like, you made her look like a thumb lit from behind. I don't know how you do that. Those things will straighten themselves out. But I think some core problems remain. One is that what GB News, I think, is trying to do in the broadcast media environment is operate as a conveyor belt from the far right and the kind of more conspiratorial far right through to legitimate mainstream politics, right? That is something which they've set out to do. And that's kind of been Dan Wooten's job. And there are lots of ways in which there's a soft edge of that. So, for instance, when you had GB News launching, you had Andrew Neil doing this long speech about the evils of cancel culture and wokery and metropolitan elites and how bad it poll is, you know, that's kind of the soft edge of that politics. And then you've got that weird, you know, kind of like far out shit, like that mad woman who was trying to talk about the difference between like pedophilia and the other one. Like, I was just like, who are you? Like, you know, the pedos appointed PR person. And I think that there's a problem, which is one, you've got a pretty right wing broadcast news media environment. Alright, so if you're a right wing person, you're pretty well served. And then anyway, what you want is to maintain your sense of grievance. You can watch the BBC and go, this is still not right wing enough. You know, they enjoy that they get a kick out of that shit. And two is like, is there a, you know, audience, a mass audience for a hyperpolarized broadcast channel? I don't know, because the internet exists for that kind of stuff. You know, broadcast news media is not a money spinner, it's not, you know, audience shares are plummeting. The reason why you want to, you know, own one or invest in one is for influence. But it's not actually about like, attracting a huge audience. I actually think GB news would have done a lot better if they just set themselves up as a YouTube channel. But no one wants to hear that, you know, the answer is turn to posting full time, but they really should have. I want to go to some more developments at GB news. This one is really, really interesting. So Gito Hari is the presenter who was suspended after taking the knee on GB news. He has now quit the channel. So he's been taken off air. Now he's quit saying, I'm not coming back. His resignation letter to the channel's chief executive said, before I took the knee on air, I discussed it with my producer, director, co-presenters, and head of newsroom. After I did it, GB news captured the moment and proactively cascaded it on social media. Two days later, you told me you wanted me to take a break for the summer. You did not say you were briefing papers and issuing a statement that accused me of breaching your editorial standards. I asked you to change that on the night, pointing out it's defamatory. You ignored my texts and refused to take my calls. I now see that you've hired Nigel Farage, who immediately declared in public that he will not be taking the knee. Please explain how that does not breach editorial standards, but I did. Now this is phenomenal. So he's saying he discussed taking the knee with his producer, with his director, with the co-presenters, and with the head of the newsroom. So this wasn't a surprise. We said before, clearly, a presenter taking the knee would not have breached editorial standards. Anyway, the whole point of that channel is it's supposed to have opinionated hosts. That was supposed to be their raise on debtor. Then the moment a host expresses something that's anti-racist, they have to go. But in any case, the fact that all of these people high up at the channel agreed with him before then briefing against him is just like the height of unprofessionalism. Again, I mean, this is proper amateur hour stuff, isn't it? All this is is Homer goes to Clown College. Do you know what I mean? This is some of the most unprofessional romper room individuals that the British media environment has to offer being given 60 million quid and told, you know what? Why don't we get you guys to staff and run a news channel based almost entirely on the stuff that your racist uncle says at Sunday dinner? So from the start, it was a completely joke offering with a serious political intention, to kind of further warp and distort the public sphere in this country. But in terms of the people who they got to try and achieve this monumental shift in the discourse, they chose Andrew Neal who came with all that prestige from the BBC. They also chose Dan Wharton and Michelle Jusbury. I'm not being rude or respect to them, but you don't really look at them and go, you know what? You are titans of political discourse. You are real serious heavy hitters. No, man, they're three toddlers, you know, doled up in a trench coat and being told like, you know, go run a news channel. So of course, this whole thing is unprofessional from top to bottom. Of course, these aren't consistent standards, which, you know, news organisations should be able to publicly identify, stand by and defend to its staff who are being held to those standards and making everything up as they go along. You know, they've probably just got like, you know, one poor chimp, you know, manning all the cameras and, you know, a golden retriever, like in charge of like lighting, editing and production, right? It's a complete circus. But I do think it points to something serious, which is there is a fundamental contradiction between being pro-freedom of speech and saying that cancel culture is an evil, that it must be, you know, ironically cancelled and drummed out of political and public life and having a hardcore anti-woke editorial line. You can't be pro-free speech whilst maintaining a hardcore anti-woke editorial line, right? Because pro-free speech means people can say what they like. As long as you have overall balance across the channel, then, you know, it's fine. And having a hard line, anti-woke editorial line means that you have to enforce that line. And I think that the position that GB News have found themselves in, this completely absurd spectacle of, you know, the scorpion stinging itself again and again, is both ideological, sure, right? That 60 million in investor funding came because there were certain, you know, political or cultural aims that had to be achieved. But I think it's also the problem they found themselves in, which is to build and sustain a broadcast news channel. You do have to, you know, build up and develop quite a broad audience, all right? You know, even though it's a really challenging time to do so in terms of, you know, broadcast news audiences, that is the thing you've got to do, right? You have to have some kind of broad appeal. It's kind of interesting that one of the things that Sky News did is, yes, it, you know, sort of was part of this big shift to the right in terms of the British media environment, but also came with so much goddamn sports coverage that it was also saying, well, you know, here's the, you know, here's the honey to go along with your medicine. We're not just going to be wholly ideological. GB News have absolutely nothing to offer, apart from, you know, there's been a bake sale in Huddersfield this week, and also, you know, BLM are a Marxist organization who want to kidnap and burn at the stake your children, right? They've got no broad based offering within that. And so if you've not got a broad based audience, well, then you've got to cultivate your audience of true believers, right? True believers who are really into the anti-woke thing, you know, they would defend the statue of Winston Churchill with their very lives. But that is then at odds with building that broad based audience, which you have to do if you want to have a broadcast news channel. So the corp between a rock and a hard place serve their, you know, small audience of reactionary nut jobs or try and build outwards. The problem is, is that if they do try and build outwards by having a variety of opinions, they lose that small hardcore audience and they'll end up with audience share of zero. So I don't envy the position they've put themselves in.