Some compulsory weekend viewing from GB News. The channel invited veteran broadcaster Michael Crick onto Neil Oliver’s show yesterday to discuss media censorship. So it was to some embarrassment then that as Crick began listing the various right-wing politicians employed there that Oliver was, er, forced to go to a break and cut the discussion off mid-flow. The full exchange unfolded as follows:

Neil Oliver: “Now you talk about being broadly wary of censorship. Ok, now on this channel, on GB News, in the company of Michelle Dewberry, you said that you thought GB News ought to be shut down…”

Michael Crick: “Because you’re biased, you’re right wing. I mean you do things like you have, you’re basically – I mean I’ve been fighting bias in television for a very long time. And it’s one of the reasons I left Channel 4 News because I thought it was left wing biased. And I think Ofcom, who are one of the weakest institutions on the planet, should get a grip on you lot. I mean it’s absurd that you have Tory MP after Tory MP after Tory MP, two leaders of the Brexit party and hardly any Labour MPs. You are a right-wing channel and the rules in this country are very clear…”

NO: “There’s no doubting, I don’t think you can deny that the channel has made space for all kinds of voices, left, right and –”

MC: “No and they’re predominantly on the right. I mean when Nigel Farage takes the week off, who replaces him? Who replaces him but the leader of Reform UK. We’ve got 67 million people in this country, you choose to replace Nigel Farage it’s his successor as Brexit party leader. You’ve got Boris Johnson, you’ve got Jacob Rees-Mogg, you’ve got Philip Davies-“

NO: “Bear with us.”

In Crick’s account, he claims that he was ‘expelled’ from the studio during the subsequent break by an ‘angry producer of the programme’ who ‘marched in’ and ‘said “Out”…”You, Out!” For his part, Oliver did not seem too pleased at the ‘conversation being brought abruptly to a close by others’, telling viewers after the advert break that:

I will say right now, without any input from anywhere else, that I’m very disappointed about the sequence of events that just unfolded there. The last thing I want to see during a conversation between grown-ups about censorship is that conversation being brought abruptly to a close by others. I feel that that conversation should have gone on to its conclusion but there we go, that’s the situation in which I find myself but I make no bones about it, I don’t stand by censorship. Ok, something completely different.

You can watch the full clip below….

when @MichaelLCrick was today thrown off GB News for being too critical of GB News…during…a debate about freedom of speech pic.twitter.com/lPqM7gmeuz

— Jim Pickard ? (@PickardJE) November 4, 2023