It's Bev Turner v Andrew Pierce in the latest GB News civil war

Not for the first time, civil war has broken out in the studios of GB News – and this time it’s more serious than when one presenter accused a colleague of stealing her orange squash.

Bev Turner, the basketball host turned tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist who now works out of the right wing channel’s Washington DC studio, lashed out after veteran TV medic Dr Hilary Jones was booked on to the station by her London colleagues.

Jones, a sofa fixture on ITV’s breakfast shows for over 35 years before leaving last October, popped up on GB News to discuss how to prevent children from getting measles. A large outbreak, mostly affecting unvaccinated kids, has been confirmed in north-east London, with some needing to be admitted to hospital.

His appearance went down well with one of the channel’s presenters. “Great to see popular TV doctor ⁦@DrHilaryJones ex @gmb on ⁦@GBNEWS,” posted Andrew Pierce, who co-hosts the morning Britain’s Newsroom show with former Tory MP Miriam Cates. “More please. He’s trusted & loved by viewers.”

Viewers, perhaps, but perhaps not GB News presenters, some of whom remain aggrieved that, throughout the pandemic, Jones maintained that Covid-19 was a nasty illness and having vaccines to stop catching it and wearing masks to stop spreading it was a good thing to do.

Ben Leo, who hosts the late-night Late Edition, was the first to wade in on behalf of GB News’s anti-vax warriors, responding to Pierce: “Not sure he’s loved by the viewers who contact me.

“I remember trying to doorstep Hilary during the height of Covid after I’d just joined GB News. His behaviour during that period was questionable, to say the least. Does he still think we should wear facemasks in the sea?”

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Leo was followed – as indeed he is in the schedule, in the midnight to 2am graveyard slot – by Turner, an anti-vax crackpot who has variously claimed that they were not effective and that the virus itself appeared to have been bioengineered to be less dangerous to some Jewish people.

In a lengthy and arguably defamatory diatribe in response, Turner wrote that “news channels build trust over time by listening to viewers and striving for truth – even if that means saying the opposite of all other outlets” (this last bit is certainly true for Turner – the only news anchor in the UK to echo Vladimir Putin’s language that his war on Ukraine is a “special military operation”).

“@DrHilaryJones was wrong on TV every day for 2 years,” she went on. “He unnecessarily scared millions of people, breaking up families via fear and causing untold death and injury by amplifying ‘covid’ risk and peddling the mrna onto all age groups.

“Everything he said during that time was based on propoganda [sic] rather than scientific evidence. I’d be thrilled to see him apologise to the nation for the significant role he played during that time. I’d be thrilled to interview him about why he ignored true infection fatality data and the evidence within Pfizer’s own 2020 trials.

“But otherwise, in my view, he should not be welcome in a building which prides itself on freedom and truth.” (That’s GB News’s Paddington studios, presumably.)

Jones’s booking sparked plenty of comments from GB News viewers pledging to switch off in their droves, prompted by their favourite hard right conspiracy channel turning woke. “GB News has become another legacy media channel, what differentiates them from the rest now,” wrote one, while others moaned “Do better or lose viewers!”, “GBNEWS is falling into line with the BBC and other Propaganda platforms” and “turned to this station because BBC had lost all credibility”.

Will that concern GB News even more than the fact that, once again, the only things its presenters hate more than wokery is each other? Depends on who they back on this one – Turner, the presenter who did a prize interview with US president Donald Trump very recently, or Pierce, who himself departed Good Morning Britain just last year when GB News slapped exclusive TV handcuffs on him.