Alas schedule has changed and I won’t be on after all
As you might be interested, here is what I would have said if I had made it to air.
It is a dreadful shame to see Dorothy Byrne systematically shredding the last suggestions of Channel 4 impartiality
1/
That a person thinks she can call the PM a liar and then expect him and other Tories to suspend disbelief and pretend her shows are impartial shows quite what bad judgement she has.
2/
Perhaps yet worse is that she compares our Prime Minister to Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine, invaded Crimea. It is very crass indeed and indicates a phenomenally erratic moral compass.
3/
Amusingly, her very next complaint is that people won’t do her shows!
Why *should* anyone do her shows?
Who could possibly believe that they - that she - is open to debate?
You don’t have a right to guests. Why would any person on the right ever go on whilst she’s in post?
4/
She demands that journalists should call politicians “liars” all the time. There’s no room in her view for mistake - on either side. No politician might be sincere but mistaken. No journalist, who like her sit on high in judgment on politicians, might actually be mistaken.
5/
She is the absolute arbiter of truth and purity in this worldview.
When asked, she pseudo-coyly wouldn’t say if liked the PM or not: I think that anyone who watched her being interviewed would not struggle to make an educated guess.
6/
Yet more in her scattergun attack: She mocked the fact that another broadcaster asked the PM who his favourite politician is (Pericles)- but then illustrated with her own mockery that it might be thought a question that drew a very revealing answer.
7/
The last target of her ire was the predictable move to avoid biased producers like her and communicate with the public directly via social media. Predictably, she sees not one scintilla of the possibility that she and those like her might be in part responsible for this.
8/
She had two arguments against this trend towards social media broadcasting. The first was on higher viewing figures for TV: so as and when online gets better, that one disappears. It’s about volume not quality, containing no element of principle.
9/
Amusingly, the other one was broadcasters being fair & impartial!
That the Head of News person goes around calling the Prime Minister a liar takes refuge in “impartiality” obligations she so plainly delights in breaching... If it weren’t so serious it would be farce
10/
In sum: it was a lengthy egotistical tantrum from someone who thinks she has every right to sit in judgment over politicians, call them any names under the sun and expect them to turn up regardless, who goes on to find that surprisingly enough... they don’t.
11/
Thus for all that she may very well have had valuable other things to say, in her torpedoing of her own channel and the hysteria of her anti-Boris ranting I imagine that regret about her doing the lecture is widespread.
/fin
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