Piers Morgan affair shows you can't simply 'cancel' views you don't like, by Rebecca McQuillan

He had to go. It’s one thing to have a view in the royal-family-versus-Meghan dispute, another to declare that you don’t believe a word somebody says when that person says she felt suicidal and her request for help was rejected. ITV is running a Campaign for Mental Wellness, for heaven’s sake.

The regulator Ofcom received more than 41,000 complaints about Mr Morgan’s comments in less than 36 hours and an investigation is now underway – the programme could be found to have breached the broadcasting code. Mr Morgan was presenting a breakfast TV programme watched by a wide cross-section of society and the same rules apply to him as to everyone else.

All said, it’s tempting from a liberal perspective to see Mr Morgan’s departure as a decisive moment – the triumph of compassion in the public debate, if you like. It shows that comment should be proportional; it underlines that words have impact and having a platform comes with responsibilities, even if you’re Piers Morgan.

All of this is true. And yet an unalloyed victory it is not.

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In general, there’s a danger in those with challenging views being lost from mainstream TV channels. We can’t get rid of views we don’t like by excluding them. We have to challenge them. The weather presenter Alex Beresford did the job admirably by taking on Piers Morgan for his unwarranted trashing of Meghan Markle on Good Morning Britain. Can we be sure that Morgan will be so readily challenged during his next broadcast gig?

Piers Morgan may have left ITV but his absence is likely to be a mere hiatus. He will be back on TV – the question is which channel, with the soon-to-be launched broadcaster GB News a distinct possibility (its chair, Andrew Neil, has made clear he’d like to appoint Mr Morgan). If he joins a personality-driven centre-right news channel, it will be easier for breakfast TV viewers who dislike him to avoid him. But it could also hasten the division of the viewing public into silos according to their political leanings.

Am I unfairly characterising GB News? It hasn’t launched yet, so we don’t know exactly what it will be like. Mr Neil and other figures associated with it insist it is wrong to characterise it as Britain’s answer to Fox News, notorious for its biased reporting and allowing its presenters to air conspiracy theories, pointing out that GB News will be bound by Ofcom’s rules on the absence of bias in news broadcasting.

Fair enough. But there is speculation that it will achieve balance across programmes, rather than necessarily within them, which could give it a very different feel from the broadcasters we are used to.

Discussing the channel last month in The Express (itself perhaps significant), Mr Neil said his new outfit will exist to cater for those who feel under-served by the mainstream news media, arguing that the direction of news debate in Britain is more and more woke and “out of touch with the majority of its people” (a contestible claim, but one which will resonate with the section of the public he wishes to appeal to).

He criticises journalists with “liberal-left assumptions” and has said that his team will not operate from the starting point that “every problem demands a government solution” or that “every solution must necessarily involve more taxpayers’ money,” words which will appeal to conservatives with a small and a large “C”.

The political team on the new channel will feature Tom Harwood of the right-leaning website Guido Fawkes and Dan Wootton, former executive editor of The Sun.

It will be personality-led, he says, by people who are knowledgeable and at times have “some edge”.

Does that sound to you like a channel that will be entirely impartial?

I guess we’ll find out more when it launches, but if the new broadcaster is perceived by the viewing public as the go-to place to hear anti-woke views, it’s hard to see how that does anything other than entrench division.

Dorothy Byrne, editor-at-large at Channel 4, said this to the BBC’s Amol Rajan this week about the move towards opinion-driven broadcasting, which itself builds on the tendency in social media for people to exist in echo-chambers of like-minded views: “We do not need further division by creating a system of broadcasting where people only see the opinions that they like. I must listen to opinions I don’t agree with and I don’t like. That’s how I come to know the truth.” Never a truer word.

It’s worth noting that critics of British broadcasters have been complaining for years that it is dominated by a lefty middle class metropolitan elite. There is truth in this (even if these same critics seem entirely at ease with the decades-long rightwing dominance of the British press).

But wow, things are changing. The BBC’s new chairman, Richard Sharp, has donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party, while Paul Dacre, the former Daily Mail editor, is strongly tipped to become Ofcom’s next chair. Meanwhile, we have a right-wing Conservative government in Downing Street that has the BBC in its sights.

We should be very, very wary of these constant attacks on broadcasters. British broadcasting is respected. Critics may look wistfully across The Pond to the American media landscape, claiming that the British media is too constrained, but they should consider this: that the BBC is a more trusted news source among Americans than any American national news brand. That was the finding of a Reuters survey conducted last summer. Only local TV news was more trusted than the British Broadcasting Corporation in the Land of the Free.

The British broadcast media is not failing. There is a direct link between the nature of American broadcasting and the extreme polarisation we have seen there. Our regulatory regime helps protect us from what the BBC journalist Clive Myrie yesterday called America’s “ultra toxic media environment” and it should be preserved and championed.

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Meanwhile, to withstand the attacks on it, the British broadcast media must continue to be a place where people may express their views – within the rules – and where they are challenged on them, whatever side of whatever debate they fall on.

That’s how democracy survives.

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