Trump and Farage TV: Two cheeks of the same backside
Opinion
For two men who live for the attention of TV cameras, launching their own streaming channels was inevitable, Ray Snoddy writes.
It may be a coincidence of timing, but the decisions this week by Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK and Donald Trump, President of the United States, to launch their own streaming TV channels on YouTube were always inevitable.
The real surprise is that they haven’t done so before to bypass the increasingly hostile scrutiny of journalists and the attention of media regulators.
However, both could suffer considerable reputational and practical damage by embracing the North Korean school of media theory.
The hit on Trump has been immediate and could grow in the run-up to the midterm elections in November.
The signs are that he decided to ban CNN, Politico and MS Now from the White House after Natalie Harp, his “special assistant” and “executive assistant”, showed him lots of “negative” coverage from the media outlets involved.
The US President has suggested more bans for critical journalists could be on the way, with The New York Times and Washington Post likely future targets.
The three outlets Trump banned have launched a legal bid to be reinstated, arguing that their removal violates the First Amendment right to free speech. Meanwhile, the remaining networks in the press pool are boycotting events in solidarity.
The result? No sound on the pictures in Newsmax’s coverage of Trump opening a helipad for President Xi of China’s arrival.
“There’s no microphone because the pool cameras aren’t there,” explained journalist Bianca de la Garza, who was covering the event.
Ironically, Newsmax is owned by Trump friend and supporter Christopher Ruddy, who believes it was a mistake for Trump to ban a network such as CNN from the White House.
And tellingly, the pool committee is chaired by Fox News, the network which has supported Trump more than any other and may have even been responsible for helping to create his presidency in the first place.
For a president who lives or dies by the attention of television cameras and his Truth Social platform, it seems like a self-inflicted wound.
To the extent he can still judge where his self-interest lies, Trump will probably be tempted to develop Trump TV beyond compilations of his greatest speeches and actually pump out his own live, uncritical coverage of himself on YouTube.
Farage TV
The situation over the launch of Reform TV, or Farage TV as it is already being called, is rather more complex.
Is Farage, who has been handsomely bankrolled by GB News, following on from his years on the now-banned Russia Today, really going to split the right-wing viewership and potentially damage one of his many golden geese?
As a former GB staffer told The Times, the two channels “will be like two cheeks of the same backside.”
The answer to what Farage is up to must lie in the £72m donated to Reform by two offshore crypto billionaires over a handful of recent days.
He now has money to spend, if Parliamentary Standards allow, and in one fell swoop he can escape the clutches of Ofcom regulators even though they have so far lamentably failed to deal with the scandal of a sitting MP running his own tendentious television programmes.
Farage’s recent return to GB News, where he was free to justify live on air receiving the extraordinary £72m, will surely receive renewed attention from Ofcom.
But thanks to YouTube, where many of his 50-plus supporters can be found, Farage can pump out virtually any old propaganda he wants.
GB News sounds confident it can see off the new opposition. But if Farage leaves the channel to concentrate on Reform TV, the split in the limited audience for right-wing TV could be more serious than they think.
But there is a bigger picture here, as Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian and now editor-at-large for The New World, recently pointed out.
Join the dots, and more than £200m has been invested by six multi-millionaires in right-wing media designed, critics would say, to overthrow conventional politics in the UK.
Rusbridger’s dots bring together the £131m already lost on GB News and this month’s £72m for Reform.
The game is far from over
The House of Commons Committee on Standards, or legislation now moving through Parliament, could rule out deploying the £72m.
Ofcom could finally take more decisive action against GB News, and Farage could be excluded from the Commons for long enough to trigger yet another by-election in Clacton, with or without Count Binface.
Another possibility is that not many viewers in the US and the UK will welcome the undiluted propaganda outlets of Trump and Farage TV.
Overall, it has been a bad week for Farage. A third Reform leader in Wales has had to be chosen. The party has fallen in the polls to 22%, behind Andy Burnham’s Labour and level with, or just marginally ahead of, the Conservatives.
Meanwhile, the number of local councillors lost since the local elections by defection, resignation or scandals has risen to 158, all requiring an expensive local by-election to replace.
Not least, the former Observer and BBC investigative reporter John Sweeney published his latest book: The Real Nigel Farage. A Would-Be Prime Minister On Trial (pictured).
As Sweeney puts it, his book presents a typical robust prosecution case against Farage and the reason why the Reform leader should never be let anywhere near Downing Street.
The prosecution case is organised around what Sweeney believes are four core traits exhibited by Farage: “charisma, cruelty, chaos and greed.”
Perhaps the most devastating is Sweeney’s account of Farage’s schooldays, told by many of his former classmates at Dulwich College speaking for the first time about the Reform leader’s alleged bullying and racist behaviour.
Sweeney lays out seven charges against Farage in his unflattering portrait.
“The seventh charge when thinking about voting for Nigel Farage as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is that in denying he was a Nazi at Dulwich, he is a liar,” Sweeney claims.
You can be sure the book is unlikely to be reviewed on Reform TV, or even GB News.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.