Is GB News ok?

GB News: are u ok hun?

Rats in a Sack only asks because, perhaps stung by The New World’s investigation into its flagrant and persistent flouting of every regulation in Ofcom’s rulebook, the channel’s editorial director has sprung to its defence in a remarkable article for its website.

The piece begins with the headline “GB News landed like an asteroid and is wiping out every dinosaur and detractor in its way”, and then gets even weirder.

Michael Booker boasts of how the hard right channel “blew apart TV news forever” and “changed the course of the country for the better” by getting Lee Anderson to try to feed someone cat food on air.

“Do you remember where you were when you realised we’d entered a thrilling new world? I do,” writes Booker, in the tone of an excited 12-year-old writing up their trip to Disneyland Paris on Trip Advisor.

“Five years ago, sat at home, I switched on GB News as it burst onto the nation’s screens, with a big bang that blew apart TV news forever.” (Although in the early days of GB News most of the big bangs were the sets falling apart as it launched weeks ahead of actually being ready.)

In a tale of total domination that exists largely in his fevered imagination, Booker describes how the channel has “flatten[ed] the old media landscape, laying waste to its rivals”, before adding “if you listen carefully, you can occasionally hear their dying screams. Every now and then, the scream manifests in a newspaper ‘investigation’, an emergency podcast or a parliamentary question”.

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Rats in a Sack

Attacking “bitter, pompous old has-beens from the old media” – Booker, in contrast, previously worked for 20 years at thrusting new media start-ups the Daily Star Sunday, Daily Express and Sunday Express – he mocks how these “scaly old reptiles are usually ex-Guardian or BBC types who went to a better school or university than you and me, leaving with First Class degrees in sneering condescension”.

Booker, who got his degree in economic and social history from Hull University, adds: “We have shifted the Overton Window so many times that we could have single-handedly kept Britain’s double-glazing industry in business.” Geddit?

He continues: “I’m proud to work for The People’s Channel, and I’m proud of the people who work here alongside me.

“I won’t sit quietly while they are unfairly criticised. I’d like to see the journalistic and political dinosaurs come into GB News, look our brilliant on and off-screen staff in the eye and dare to criticise them to their face.

“They wouldn’t because they are cowards. They’d prefer to hide behind their keyboards, podcast mics and questions in parliament rather than say it out loud in the real world. But the real world is rejecting them.

“The dinosaurs will soon have all died out,” he concludes, with some mind-bending grammar. “The new world is here. It’s a GB News world.”

Meanwhile, the actual New World’s dossier of persistent breaches of the Ofcom code by Booker’s employer is in front of the government and the regulator itself. Rattled much, Mike?