The channel has become an echo chamber for the populist right, and ratings are rising. It’s long past time for the regulator to wake up
It sounds at first like what Donald Trump once called “locker room banter”. Just two guys, unwittingly taped having the kind of conversation that women always secretly worry men might be having behind their backs; the one where it doesn’t matter how bright or confident you are, because if necessary they can still just reduce you to meat. “Who’d want to shag that?” rages Laurence Fox, the fading actor turned failed political candidate, of a young political reporter called Ava Evans whose views on men’s mental health (expressed on the BBC) had apparently displeased him. His mate Dan Wootton, who may be vaguely familiar to you from allegations of sexual harassment currently being investigated by a previous employer, chuckles before noting that poor Evans is actually “very beautiful”. So maybe she is shaggable, after all? There’s editorial balance for you.
But it wasn’t a private locker room conversation, of course. It was a segment on GB News, the channel that says the quiet bit out loud, broadcast within days of all the public soul-searching about how Russell Brand got away with being openly misogynistic on the radio in the 00s. You can tell how far we’ve come since then because within hours, Wootton had issued an apologetic statement suggesting he was actually smirking in shock at his guest’s outburst. And you can tell how far we still have to go by the way Fox then published a private exchange of messages, purporting to show Wootton posting laughing emojis when talking about the programme. Both men are now suspended, pending investigation, which obviously couldn’t have happened to two nicer guys. Wootton was also sacked today by MailOnline, where he was a columnist. But hold the schadenfreude, because half the problem with GB News is the way it has been treated as a joke for too long.
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