Is Andrew Neil all right? Rats in a Sack only asks as the veteran journalist, now 77, appears to be posting increasingly bonkers views on social media.
In the past few days, Neil has been ruminating on the apparent left wing dominance of US broadcast media, a theme which will appear perplexing to anyone who has ever seen or heard US broadcast media. Responding to a post on X by Bob Pickard, a US PR man who had written the not wildly controversial view that the “defining trend in US television news over the past 30 years has been polarization and the expansion of conservative media”, Neil wrote that “this word salad can’t rewrite the facts”.
“The defining trend over the past 30 years was the emergence of an overwhelmingly left-leaning broadcast media post Reagan abolishing the fairness doctrine – eventually producing a right-leaning reaction as folks from Fox News onwards realised there was a gap in the market for an antidote,” he wrote.
“Despite that response, with the emergence of strong right-wing voices, US broadcast media still tilts largely left. But the backlash has gathered pace. CBS could be latest to fall.” Right you are then, Andrew!
Neil has also been busy defending Elon Musk against any suggestion his becoming a trillionaire might be in any way problematic, spending pretty much a full day last week quote-tweeting anyone critical of the hard right X owner and rubbishing them.
One example was podcaster Lewis Goodall, who had written that “Musk as a trillionaire- anyone as a trillionaire – is a grotesque economic, moral and political problem. We cannot have individuals with that level of power, whatever they might have achieved.”
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Neil quote-tweeted this with “What difference does it make to your life?” Goodall responded: “That extraordinarily concentrated wealth makes a difference to the lives of everyone in a democracy”, responded Goodall, prompting Neil to sniff: “Give me an example of that difference, please.” In a reference to Musk’s disgraceful stewardship of X, formerly Twitter, the answer was: “How about buying – as a monopoly – the most important political information website in the world, which quite literally this week helped promote race riots in a British city?”
Neil’s increasingly erratic output comes as the Times launches – to no little fanfare, and presumably a fair bit of cash – The Andrew Neil Report, its new weekly podcast.
The show has been launched with ads – which, with its large picture of Neil’s florid features, look rather like they’re peddling treatment for gout – across the Times and Sunday Times’s pages as its new flagship political podcast. Which must have come as news to Patrick Maguire and Steven Swinford, who must have thought their The State of It was the publisher’s flagship political podcast when it launched just eight months ago.
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