In general, the US boasts a more obvious symbiosis between TV stardom and political success than the UK (see: Trump, Donald). But it’s in the UK that serving politicians getting their own news shows is fast becoming a trend.
Nadine Dorries (who, last time I checked, is still just about a Tory MP) is a host on Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, while her colleagues Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and married MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies all have slots on the rival rightwing channel, GB News. Across the floor, David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has a phone-in show on LBC radio.
Already, professional lines have become blurred. On her debut TalkTV show, Dorries “interviewed” her former boss, Boris Johnson. In March, McVey and Davies sat down with Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, to discuss the budget.
This growing trend has faced regulatory scrutiny: the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom is investigating the Hunt interview and, as of this month, segments that Rees-Mogg and Alex Salmond, the leader of the Alba Party, hosted on GB News and TalkTV, respectively. Under current rules, sitting MPs can’t host shows defined as “news”, or any shows during election or referendum campaigns in which they are involved. The rest of the time, they can host shows defined as “current affairs”, including on news channels, so long as they incorporate a range of viewpoints.
A growing number of voices think this practice should be banned entirely. “Politicians are politicians and journalists are journalists,” Andrew Neil, who helped found GB News before walking out, said earlier this month . “We should stick to doing our own knitting.”
Chris Banatvala, who helped write Ofcom’s current rules in the mid-2000s, has suggested that the regulator should take a view as to “whether what is emerging is acceptable in terms of due impartiality”. Ofcom has already started to research public attitudes towards politicians as hosts.
Numerous critics of the practice fear that it may Americanise the UK’s TV landscape, with the spectre of Fox News looming large in the imagination. As a Briton who writes mostly about the US media, I’m not sure this is quite right. I’ve argued that Fox is a peculiarly American beast – and besides, non-politicians could just as easily import it as politicians. (Indeed, Fox’s vilest hosts have never sought office.)
In fact, while it is relatively common for American politicians to get their start as TV news hosts, and vice versa, it is rare for sitting politicians to host programmes. Last year, in the Columbia Journalism Review I identified nearly 100 local news anchors who went on to run for office. And there are former national-level politicians hosting shows on Fox News and NBC.
But as far as serving politicians go, I could think only of Matt Gaetz, a camera-hogging pro-Trump Congressman from Florida who guest-hosted on the rightwing network Newsmax recently. And one network insider told the news site Mediaite that his appearance was the “worst idea I’ve heard in a long time”.
As I see it, politicians becoming media figures, and vice versa, is not inherently wrong. The appropriateness of such moves depends on who is involved and what they want to accomplish. How responsibly they use their media platform matters most. Still, there are a few specific problems with the growing trend in the UK. Current politicians stepping into big media platforms is an obviously fraught area. The media have an urgent responsibility to hold those in office to account, and not to actively promote their political careers.
Ofcom’s current rules seem confused. If we are to borrow anything from the US, it should perhaps be its apparent instinctive aversion to the idea of serving politicians being hosts – and its experience of how blurred the lines between “news” and “opinion” can be.
For Ofcom, the format of a given show currently matters most. On the radio, Lammy, for example, takes calls from listeners with diverse points of view. Ofcom is investigating whether McVey and Davies sufficiently incorporated those into their Hunt interview or broke other aspects of its presenting rules, while Rees-Mogg is under scrutiny for reading out a news-style bulletin about a recent legal case involving Trump.
But it’s tricky to draw clean lines here. In a recent explainer, Ofcom defined a “news” programme with reference to the sort of direct, clipped presenting style that you might expect to see, for example, on a BBC News bulletin – but I would advocate a broader, less immediately aesthetic definition of the term, one that would unambiguously define an interview with a newsworthy political figure such as Hunt or Johnson as “news”.
Incorporating different views is a worthy aim, but the host of a show often has the power to decide which views are heard, and on what terms. The blanket ban on politician hosts applying only at election time also strikes me as arbitrary. Politicians always have one eye on the next election.
In reconsidering its rules, Ofcom should at least take a more nuanced approach to defining and policing these sorts of guidelines, and aim to close up any obvious loopholes. It may well be simplest for the body to ban sitting MPs from hosting any type of show at any time. This may set a thorny precedent for MPs holding down other media gigs, such as newspaper columns. But that needn’t concern Ofcom.
Banning sitting MPs from hosting TV shows would not, in isolation, clean up the cronyism of the British media landscape, much of which occurs off-screen. But I don’t want to see that landscape further clogged with (mostly Tory) MPs interviewing their mates before traipsing off together to parliament to vote and drink together. If having been a politician shouldn’t disqualify you from the world of TV hosting, you should at least have to pick a lane.
Back in the US, Matt Gaetz reportedly considered retiring from Congress to work for Newsmax full-time in 2021. He ultimately stayed in Congress. After his recent guest-hosting gig at Newsmax, perhaps US TV viewers have more cause to fear an impending “Britishisation” than the other way around.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today
