GB News is easy to dismiss precisely because it’s so low-rent. It looks like it’s filmed in a Ramada conference room. It’s Victor Meldrew in television form. In between ads for commemorative coins and stairlifts you get dimwits banging on about stuff they clearly don’t understand (I fell of my chair laughing when one of their pretentious fools spoke of “crossing the lexicon”). That’s not to say all their presenters are nitwits, but they are weighed down by them.
A few leather chairs and a William F. Buckley type to host and they could lift the vibe.
Happy that I wrote this piece, just to hear from you that someone actually said 'crossing the lexicon'. Why are conservative perspectives so badly represented on TV? I understand the Richard Hanania view that conservatives are generally less intellectually sophisticated, but there are still plenty of highly intelligent people who don't default leftward.
In a lot of spheres (including academia and the arts), “coming out” as right wing can carry a cost. (See Shields and Dunn’s book Passing on the Right). Signing up to be the “face of conservatism” on TV is permanently closing other career doors. I’m not surprised people won’t take that risk for GB News.
"I often ponder whether I'd vote for Trump, were I eligible to."
I keep thinking about this question. I keep coming to the same place you do, though perhaps with more passion: I can't vote for someone who schemed to overturn their election loss, especially when they have never owned up to it and continue to lie about it. Joe Biden could be in a coma and I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump.
However, I don't think his election would be the disaster the liberals imagine, at least from a policy perspective (though I suspect that our discourse spaces will be spitting toxins in all directions).
GB News is easy to dismiss precisely because it’s so low-rent. It looks like it’s filmed in a Ramada conference room. It’s Victor Meldrew in television form. In between ads for commemorative coins and stairlifts you get dimwits banging on about stuff they clearly don’t understand (I fell of my chair laughing when one of their pretentious fools spoke of “crossing the lexicon”). That’s not to say all their presenters are nitwits, but they are weighed down by them.
A few leather chairs and a William F. Buckley type to host and they could lift the vibe.
Happy that I wrote this piece, just to hear from you that someone actually said 'crossing the lexicon'. Why are conservative perspectives so badly represented on TV? I understand the Richard Hanania view that conservatives are generally less intellectually sophisticated, but there are still plenty of highly intelligent people who don't default leftward.
In a lot of spheres (including academia and the arts), “coming out” as right wing can carry a cost. (See Shields and Dunn’s book Passing on the Right). Signing up to be the “face of conservatism” on TV is permanently closing other career doors. I’m not surprised people won’t take that risk for GB News.
(And I’m not sure Hanania is really the benchmark of intellectual sophistication!)
Makes sense. And then the dumbness of the channel becomes self-reinforcing as people with no real reputation to lose become its mainstays.
He's a top tier troll though.
"I often ponder whether I'd vote for Trump, were I eligible to."
I keep thinking about this question. I keep coming to the same place you do, though perhaps with more passion: I can't vote for someone who schemed to overturn their election loss, especially when they have never owned up to it and continue to lie about it. Joe Biden could be in a coma and I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump.
However, I don't think his election would be the disaster the liberals imagine, at least from a policy perspective (though I suspect that our discourse spaces will be spitting toxins in all directions).