Brexit champion Nigel Farage has been invited to host a new show on GB News four days a week – shortly after the broadcaster temporarily dropped to “zero” viewers when a host took the knee in solidarity with BLM-inspired footballers.
“So since politics, I have done a fair bit of broadcasting, and broadcasting matters,” said the former UKIP and Brexit Party (later Reform UK) leader in a social media video announcing the move.
“It gets people to look at issues, think about issues, in different ways, and can be very influential,” he explained.
“I did three and a half years at LBC, with I think some degree of success. On YouTube I’ve had millions of people watching my videos, and often I’ve covered stories that everybody else wants to ignore.
“Well, I’m now going to be doing it on a regular basis here on GB News,” he continued, announcing his new 7 p.m. show Farage, which the upstart broadcaster host from Monday to Thursday every week.
“Oh, and also, I won’t be taking the knee for anyone on this show,” he added cheekily.
That last remark was a pointed reference to a stunt pulled by another GB News presenter, the now-suspended Guto Harri, who got down on one knee live on-air in solidarity with Black Lives Matter inspired ethnic minority footballers who received some racial abuse online — possibly largely from outside Britain, some reports suggest — after missing key penalties in the Euros tournament final and costing England the championship.
“I actually now get it, and so much so, that I think we should all take the knee. In fact, why not take the knee now and just say, ‘It’s a gesture, but it’s an important gesture’,” Harri declared.
Following this gesture by the host, an 18-year veteran of the BBC who was also Boris Johnson’s director of external affairs during his liberal mayoralty in London, viewership of the news channel, which people had taken to be an “anti-woke” enterprise, dipped so low as to be unmeasurable on several occasions — despite having beaten the BBC and trounced Sky News at launch.
The move to give Nigel Farage a regular prime time slot may go some way towards restoring the faith of viewers who had high hopes for the upstart channel but had begun to complain it was “controlled opposition”.
“I have to say, I think the need for this channel is absolutely enormous,” Farage said in a longer YouTube video taking people behind the scenes at the GB News studios.
“I find across mainstream broadcast media in this country they all virtually agree on everything; they ignore stories that should be talked about and frankly they’re propaganda machines for a centre-left agenda.
“They support diversity of everything except for opinion,” he added.
This attitude is suspected to be the reason for Farage’s abrupt exit from talk radio network LBC, after his comments likening the statue-smashing Black Lives Matter movement to the Taliban — which famously destroyed historic Buddhist monuments during its pre-September 11th reign — caused anger among staff.
His departure was followed by the fanatically anti-Brexit leftist present James O’Brien quipping triumphantly that he and his compatriots had “got our station back”.
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