GB News just complained there are not enough white people in TV adverts

Hard-right TV channel GB News has just published an article decrying the supposed “under-representation of white people on TV adverts, which it describes as “dangerous” and “toxic”.

The article even claims that the murder of US far-right hate-speaker Charlie Kirk – many question whether Israel murdered him because he was starting to turn against the Zionist occupation – means that the ‘debate’ is all the more important.

GB News: if it walks like a racist…

Retired GB News presenter Colin Brazier writes that:

Later this month… I will be on a panel in Westminster for a debate about free speech. I accepted the invitation before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, but his murder has made me recognise that those of us who can have a duty to debate ideas in public.

The discussion, organised by the brilliant and inexhaustible [far-right Brexit party peer] Claire Fox, is about who “controls the narrative” in Britain today. Is our public discourse directed by government, the mainstream media, big business, charities, or think-tanks? Or, thanks to Elon Musk, have we arrived in the sunlit uplands of citizen journalism? You will have your own opinions.

Brazier then goes on to suggest that the Hitler-saluting Elon Musk is responsible for a surge in ‘citizen journalism’. He then spouts against the “harmful” and supposedly-excessive appearance of people with more pigment on TV, demanding to know:

Why do they do it? And, just as importantly, does it matter? For what it’s worth, I don’t for a second believe there is a conspiracy to marginalise white men. I don’t think advertisers are acting in concert. But that’s not to say it isn’t happening, or isn’t harmful.

I suspect the over-representation of black people and the concomitant disappearance of white folk in adverts is what happens when lots of different advertising agencies sing from the same post-George Floyd hymn-sheet. In aggregate, it looks deliberate. In reality, it’s sort of accidental. But the effect? Toxic.

Brazier then claims that the “creative industries” are deliberately ignoring the sensitivities and feelings of the “native white population” – poor, downtrodden souls that they are:

Our creative industries – film, TV, advertising, and theatre – choose to ignore the emotions they stir among the native white population by disproportionately depicting Britain as far less white than it actually is.

Tommy Robinson-esque

Brazier then descends into language about a “race-grievance industry” “bashing whitey over the head” that might not be out of place in the mouth of a (slightly more educated) “getting are country back” Tommy Robinson fan:

But this is to assume that most Britons are colour-blind. And, in truth, they are not. Not least because we now have a race-grievance industry which has kept bashing whitey over the head with the message that race matters a very great deal.

He then goes on to complain in his GB News column that that the posters in his doctor’s waiting room didn’t show a “younger white man” and that the BBC ran a positive story about a college that had boosted its number of ethnic minority students, because:

Would the BBC rhapsodise about a college which had boosted its white representation? Of course not.

The fact that the college wouldn’t need to doesn’t seem to occur to him.

After a bit of musing on whether there might be too many gay political party leaders in Scotland, Brazier comes to what might be his main – knowing GB News – point: Islamophobia and the supposed government failure to crack down hard enough on Muslims.

GB News: far-right racism dressed up as TV

Brazier concludes:

behind all this, important principles lurk. Islamists, for instance, are very much over-represented on MI5’s terrorist watchlists, with the majority of the 40,000 people of interest to the security services holding Jihadist views.

For now, the government allows us to point this out, content to simply overemphasise that terrorists are drawn from all communities, white-British included.

But I have a suspicion that, if those drafting Islamophobia laws get their way, it will be increasingly difficult to highlight this dangerous over-representation without being denounced – and quite possibly charged – as a peddler of hate crimes.

Brazier wrote this in a country that is currently criminalising and repressing protest and speech against the slaughter of almost 700,000, mostly Muslim, Palestinian civilians and whose government is actively participating in the genocide; in a country where race-hate and attacks on Muslims rose by almost 800% in a single year while criticism of Israel’s crimes is included in supposedly-increasing ‘antisemitism’ statistics.

Those facts are distinctly under-represented in UK media. Colin Brazier, GB News, and the Israel lobby seem untroubled, and seemingly peeved that the repression is not going further – as we saw in yesterday’s so-called ‘vigil’ at a pro-Israel synagogue in Manchester.

Featured image via the Canary