GB News
I’m about to make a set of claims that to a GB News viewer / reader that might seem outlandish, but I am sure to substantiate them in full with my analyses of their news articles.
GB News is a far right news source. It practices bad journalism. It intentionally ideologically frames events. It selectively reports in support of this ideology.
GB News’s ideology is fundamentally racist and anti-woke. All of their rhetoric is interconnected, so it is hard to address any of it alone. Give me any GB News article and I can tell you how it contributes to their rhetoric. While admittedly some of their articles are alone harmless, they all have their place in the harmful GB news rhetoric.
As I talk about GB news, I’ll often prop up this character of a GB-news reader, enraged by the articles that GB news puts out. This is a dissection tool. This character is of a British individual who is economically diempowered and is seeking an enemy to explain their loss of control. GB News offers a simple answer: migrants and woke moralists. It is a cultural explanation rather than a material world, and we live in a material world.
One of their favourite things to report on is the so-called “migrant crisis”. First of all, I’d like to mention the selective reporting. GB News is not a balanced news source. I can almost guarantee that they will always have some outraging article about the immigrant situation. Their framing is that immigrants are given the red carpet in the UK, living in hotels which are typically depicted as lavish, given massive amounts of taxpayer money without working for it. All the while, immigrants are criminals and rapists. Often, their logic extends to claiming migrant nationalities are criminals and rapists.
I’m really struggling to describe their ideology so I’m just going to dissect some articles. I hate looking at GB news. It’s rage bait for me as much as it is for the average GB news viewer, except they’re angry at immigrants and woke-ism and I’m angry at racism and bad journalism.
Also, I’m not cherry-picking. I’m doing the opposite, I’m avoiding going deep and intentionally highlighting the articles on their front page, especially the one big one that they really want you to see.
Also also, I’ve recently realised myself using “migrant” too uncarefully. A migrant is just a person from another part of the world moving to this part of the world in hopes of a better life. Immigrant is often used as a synonym, from the perspective of the nation. Here, I’ll be using immigrant as GB News uses migrant, that is to specifically refer to illegal immigrants. I leave a note that using illegal immigrant and migrant interchangeably supports their racist narrative, linking the two distinct groups and the crimes of any individual within either group to the entirety of both groups, and often migrant nationalities as well.
Also once more, I’m sorry, but people of other areas have been living here since the dawn of humanity. Their integration is less about them becoming British and moreso about the British culture absorbing foreign culture into itself. It happened with the Celtic Britons and the Romans (the resultant group I’m going to cheekily call Welsh), It happened with the Welsh and the Germanics creating the Anglo-Saxons. It happened with the Norse, the Normans, the Dutch, the French, the Italians, the Polish. It keeps happening, and it’ll never stop, and It’s a good thing in part because we get nice pizza restaurants and Vegetarian Food Studio Cardiff.
Pro-migration protest group escorted by police is funded by trade unions and led by Diane Abbott
https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-protest-hotel-escorted-essex-police-trade-unions-diane-abbott Headlining is a huge part of this. I often find headlines to be the worst part of modern journalism. I have previously criticized BBC’s headlines and made assumptions about the contents about the article that were then false. BBC does a decent job at actually reporting on issues when their headlines have framing issues.
First of all, let me propose an alternate headline based on the actual content of the article. A less engaging, but more realistic headline.
“Police escorts Stand up to Racism group”
The article is criminally short.
Headlining the group as pro-migration is dichotomous thinking. What they are in reality is a group of people who are against the racism in the rhetoric of reform UK and therefore its pet news source GB news. What they care about is the poor treatment of migrants and the portrayal of them that GB news spouts. Individuals who are part of the organisation likely have a variety of views on actual migration policy, and while some might be pro-migrant in a sense, others might support a more generally agreeable idea that immigration should still be controlled.
My issue here is that “pro-migrant” isn’t a meaningful term. It encapsulates two ideas: that migrants should be treated like people and not subject to racism, and that immigrants should be let into the country freely. To label the group as pro migrant is to say that because they agree with the first proposition, they must agree with the second. It is to make both propositions the same.
Then there is the subtle tie-in to the idea that the police are woke. Although by far the most honest thing in the title, the intent is that the police are supporting the message of the protest. In reality, police have a duty to escort any and all protests so that they can stop any violence that occurs, either from protestors or counter-protestors. They do not support anything, they are merely here to keep things civil.
The last part, about who the group is funded by, is intended to tie in this disagreeable “pro-migration” force with trade unions and whoever Diane Abbott is. GB News viewers are likely to already believe that trade unions are bad, and that migration is bad, but if they had weak convictions on one or the other this is supposed to strengthen the bond of those convictions.
In reality, it doesn’t matter who the group is funded by. The group consists of people with ideas like “let’s not be racist guys”. These people have money. Trade unionists generally are also these people. Diane Abbott, whoever they are, is also a person with this idea. They all fund their own efforts. So what? This is how group organisation works.
I suppose the intention is to discourage union leadership by saying that you’re money will go to a “pro-migration” group. I doubt any regular GB news reader is in a union anyway.
The actual article itself only adds information on this “Diane Abbott” character. It highlights how this MP was “suspended from the Labour Party… after ‘doubling down’ on Jewish racism claims”. This is just really unsound wording. What are “Jewish racism claims?” Is it her claim that Labour is racist towards Jewish people? Is it claims towards her that she is racist towards Jewish people? The fact that I’m leaving a news article with more questions than answers is ridiculous.
To address the former, there is a narrative among supporters of the Israeli state that to criticize Israel is to be antisemitic. This is a false equivalence founded in the idea of ethno-states. The logic is that because Israel is a state for Jewish people, criticizing Israel is anti-Jewish and therefore antisemitic. I am not about to deconstruct ethno-states. The Jewish ethnic group and religion are not inherently tied to the state of Israel. There are numerous Jewish people who criticise the actions of Israel and they are real Jews.
The Labour party has had a purge, moving it far away from its original ideals and towards mainstream conservatism. Labour are the new tories, but old tories are going to reform.
They follow this whole thing with a bunch of quotes that are said in poor English and are not actually cited. It’s apparently from a post to social media, but I’m too lazy to find it myself and a decent journalist should provide a link to the original post regardless.
The final point I have to make is in the images of the article. There are numerous individuals holding up signs and speakers, but the one person GB News wants to show you is this one larger woman in a yellow T-shirt. To any reasonable person, this means nothing, but in the wider context of GB News and their anti-woke narrative, the intention is to reinforce the character of woke people that are fat (and therefore lazy) moralists who don’t actually know what’s going on. To be clear, I’m sure the woman in the picture is lovely.
There’s also this other banner that they have on their articles. It reads like another headline, but I’ve noticed it sometimes has something to do with the article and GB News’s narrative. This time, it seems completely irrelevant.
Home Office launches urgent probe into migrant payment cards after hotel asylum seekers caught gambling with taxpayer cash
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/migrant-crisis-home-office-probe-payment-cards Look ma! Migrants are gambling our money!
I find it mentionable that GB news headlines are unreasonably long. I believe, or I know, that it is because they need to peddle their narrative and the actual contents in their headline alone. Just informing is not enough, people must get their news and their outlook from the headline alone. In my previous analysis, I proposed a concise, 7-word title that actually described the contents of the article without being the whole article themself. A good news article would have a simple headline and be exhaustive reporting. GB News is the opposite: a wordy headline and empty articles.
This article’s weird banner thing is “Migrants are given £9.95 a week to spend on their card”.
I’m not entirely sure what the framing here is. Are we supposed to believe that they have other sources of income? £9.95 is not enough for one person. I don’t even know if it’s for each individual, or a family. Again, I am left with more questions than answers.
This time, I’ve actually bothered to answer these questions with a cursory google search. Add me to the list of google debunkers. They get this figure from https://www.gov.uk/asylum-support/what-youll-get, under “If your accommodation provides your meals”. Interestingly, migrants will “usually get £49.18” if accommodation doesn’t provide meals, per person. Pretty sure this is per week. We can assume then that immigrants are expected to buy a weeks worth of food for themselves for £40. In my area, you can live off of ready meals for around £10 a day, if you’re really skimping. If you have a way to make water hot, you could live off of pesto pasta for around £6. £40 to me seems a seriously bare-bones food allowance. I think it’s fair, if you want people to be alive.
To be fair to GB News, they do actually give these figures alongside their information. Things that are readily available on the government website. I am tempted to count this as rigorous journalism, but alas, it is not. And you know what? The actual body of this article (minus all of the narrative stuff) is actually a reporting. Not a very rigorous one, but a reporting nonetheless.
Because the body itself is devoid of rhetoric, it seems they have to go in hard at the very end. After all, this isn’t about the bare essentials the government is providing worried people in near-destitute conditions (if it is not just destitution). It is about migrants being criminals and gamblers.
Money is given to immigrants so that they can feed themselves. When a very small number of people given this money instead uses it for some money-sink entertainment, it is not a “slap in the face” to the hand that feeds them. These immigrants just want entertainment, which you often need money for. Gambling machines are a form of entertainment, and if immigrants use gambling machines to spend money they need for food, it is a consequence of the well researched exploitative nature of these gambling machines. These consequences that affect millions of Britons paying millions of pounds that they too could spend on more useful things.
At the face of it, I would not have an issue with immigrants spending money on gambling. It is a form of entertainment, albeit an exploitative one, and I (controversially) believe that human people should be able to entertain themselves. I may concede that anyone who needs the money for bare necessities shouldn’t spend it on entertainment. There are usually free avenues for entertainment.
Back to the awful framing of GB News.
They peddle the narrative that immigrants are treated like kings. That they are given cushy hotels and all the necessities they need. They say this explicitly, although it is in a quote to feign neutrality. “The British tax payer has put them in hotels… These illegal immigrants clearly don’t need the money they are given if they are are squandering it at casinos and arcades”
And like, what the fuck are you on about? If they’re spending Aspen money at casinos, that’s instead of food! You’re kicking the victim into the Channel and holding their face underwater! They live in cramped spaces bunked in with others with no privacy! Their “hotels” are a far reach from your typical Premier Inn experience!
GB News over-reports this with shitty journalism. No substance articles that say nothing but their rhetoric on how migrants need to be kicked out of the country, and not treated to basic human necessities.
Look at this guardian article. THIS IS REAL JOURNALISM! A lovely title, “A day in the life of an asylum hotel”, with a colon for an alternate title of “inside the UK’s most controversial accommodation”. It is thorough. It interviews people. It’s humanising. The GB News articles are the opposite, they only “interview” the “real British workers” who definitely aren’t in a feedback loop of getting their racist opinions from the very news articles sent by GB news.
I will say it a thousand times. GB News are not real journalists. They are headline artists peddling a racist narrative that helps distract the working class from the real issues. Those real issues? Described in the rest of my ideology series. Long story short? Capitalism.