It’s more than 25 years since I left the BBC. I hadn’t been there long, but long enough to know we weren’t going to get along.
So I joined an upstart news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch. It might sound odd now, but in the 1990s Sky News was a little bit like GB News.
Rough at the edges. Anti-Establishment. And, at least in comparison to the BBC, ever-so-slightly right-wing.
Not any more. Over the last decade, Sky has gone full-woke. Strangely, the folk who run it, seem not to notice.
Earlier this year Sky News (deservedly) copped a lot of flak for its coverage of events in Israel. I posted this tweet: “The Sky I joined in ’97 offered an alternative to the BBC’s baked-in bias. Now it feels like the paramilitary wing of Channel 4 News.”
Within minutes a senior figure at Sky contacted me privately, frostily denying my accusation that Sky was more interested in activism than journalism. But how else can we describe the way Sky News now goes about its business?
Take an example this week. Many media outlets ran a story about the Notting Hill Carnival based on a survey of police officers by their ‘trade union’, the Police Federation.
Nearly a third of those sampled said they’d been assaulted at the Carnival. Nine out of ten said they felt a sense of dread in the run up to the annual event, which this year resulted in two killings and 350 violent or sexual offences.
The BBC promoted the story without embellishment. Its headline ran: ‘Police feel unsafe working at Carnival, survey claims’.
But Sky’s online offering flipped the story around. The main headline read: ‘Anti-Notting Hill Carnival agenda’: Organisers criticise survey – as officers brand event ‘war zone’.
Beneath that, a smaller headline pointed out that ‘Carnival organisers condemn a police survey as being “driven by unsubstantiated quotes”.’
Should the Notting Hill Carnival be cancelled?PASky weren’t lying. That’s not how editorialising works. It’s fractionally more subtle than that.
But they appeared to be favouring an interpretation that complements their corporate worldview. And what is that worldview? It’s one based on identity politics and elite group-think.
When I resigned from Sky for GB News in 2021, I was repelled by what I took to be a form of creeping political correctness.
Appalled to be made to listen to the transparent agitprop of an ‘unconscious bias’ course. Astonished by Sky’s seeming adoption of BLM and trans orthodoxies. Saddened when the channel appeared not to care about the misgivings of loyal viewers, particularly in relation to its Brexit coverage (I remain gobsmacked that Sky thought it a good idea to make Jon Bercow their star pundit for the 2019 General Election).
Seen in that context, you begin to understand why Sky can’t see the Notting Hill Carnival as the rest of us can. The channel was mocked on X this year when one of its correspondents on the ground in Notting Hill enumerated the number of arrests, knives recovered and stabbings, before adding: “But overall it’s been really peaceful.”
Thankfully, the mainstream media’s monopoly on news provision is coming to an end. This week we learned that GB News has overtaken Sky’s ratings. More generally, individual citizens are learning to speak for themselves on digital platforms. And not just on X.
Take this post from the Oracle chat forum, where police officers, serving and retired, share stories of front-line operations. Forgive me for quoting it in full, but I think – no pun intended – that it’s warranted.
LATEST MEMBERSHIP OPINION:
‘Anthony’ wrote this week: “Many years ago I was policing the Carnival with a small team of officers when we arrested a young man for armed robbery. He was cutting off a young girl’s shoulder bag with a carving knife that looked like a Cossack’s sabre.
“The crowd turned on us and I got separated and was beaten unmercifully. I knew that if I had been knocked to the ground I would not have survived. Two police officers thankfully found me and got me help.
“A fractured skull, bleeding into the brain, damaged eye sight, were the worst injuries I received. I was not posted to the Carnival the next year, but the following year I was once again at the Carnival on foot duty. There was a disturbance and when I went into the crowd I stepped on a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver that had the pistol grips removed.
“Sounds like it’s got even more violent. I salute the officers who police the event today.”
There are activists who would describe this account as ‘anti-Carnival’, the ramblings of an old (probably) white copper with an axe to grind. And there is a news channel that would take that ‘anti-Carnival’ view and make it their headline. In my view, they are both wrong.
Apologists for the Carnival say it’s not much worse than what happens at Glastonbury or when football hooligans collide. Demonstrable statistical nonsense.
The Notting Hill Carnival has degenerated into a macabre festival of stabbing that has no place on Britain’s streets. At the very least, it ought to be moved to a controlled environment like Hyde Park.
The worst thing about the Sky News headline this week is that it seems based on an assumption that to be ‘anti-carnival’ is to be ethically suspect. In reality, in the real world long ago abandoned by Sky, to be anti-carnival is to accept reality.
Were it not held aloft as a sacred cow of multiculturalism, the Notting Hill Carnival would have been wound up years ago.