161: Unwise Councils

22:24Saba Salman:are they doing that though specifically to take a run at being um at being presidential candidate next time around because that is who can say adam they're not they're not announcing they're not running who can who can say what the ambitions of it is is it not i'm like i do find it slightly bizarre i'm in a situation here of kind of arguing for a system of kemi bay knock but having no effective leader of the opposition is quite weird isn't it i mean we don't we don't get a single figure who the party unites behind until the next round of presidential primaries which is sort of two, three years away?

22:53After the midterms, the PAC will begin to emerge. That's November next year. But is that why they have to have so bloody long choosing the candidates so that they can actually show their people to the electorate and say, look, these are your potential leaders of the party? There is a real idea that the primary season is about really lots of people, the core, various core votes for the parties getting their say. So one of the big questions about next time is Pete Buttigieg is running. He hasn't announced it, but everyone knows he is. He is gay, married to a guy, got two adopted kids. There is a question over whether the Democratic base, which is church-going black Americans, often in southern states, are ready to vote for a gay candidate.

23:33And so people are very tense about him running. But in 2008, people were very tense about the idea about whether or not white Americans would vote for a black Democrat. So one thing that you do is have that primary season, and Barack Obama emerged through that primary season as just being the obvious superstar. And therefore, people felt OK about sending him into the general. They didn't feel it was such a massive risk because he had proved himself through that long audition process. Is it not a big disadvantage to whichever party is not in office at the moment that you have a president who is very well known?

24:07And most of the electorate are not paying a huge amount of attention to politics, but, you know, they will know who the president is. Yeah, that's why they call it the bully pulpit. That's that is the great benefit of the American presidency is you get to just be the one person. news in charge and there's no one with an equivalent stature and quite notoriously when you have the first president versus contender debate that contender gets a bump in their polling ratings because for the first time they're on stage with the president they move up from this sort of amorphous realm of opposition to being like president versus would-be president you know the status increases you know and that's often about that you know when when you narrow it down to that one person who is the nominee from the other party that's when they get secret service protection for example right there is just a feeling at that point they ascend yeah but this is compounded at the moment due to the fact that the republicans control the presidency but also the house and the senate so they've got the trifecta i'm going to use one of my many knobby american words in this the midterms are such a big event that trump has been very keen to consolidate his power and basically if they lose control of the house the senate in the midterms that means that the opposition party gets to control the legislative agenda so what gets voted on.

25:19They get to be in charge of the committees which might do things like investigate some of the actions of Donald J. Trump, Esquire, that sort of thing. So he's very keen to retain control and so he's been pushing Republican states, red states, to change their congressional maps. And you do that by basically taking a swing district and finding a bit of red and kind of cobbling that on the side. That's the gerrymander. However, this has gone not as well as he thought. And I thought we could just take a moment to appreciate. I love it when someone does something that's really ethically wrong and then it backfires on them.

25:51And this one looks like it might do that. So it started really in Texas. They made another five seats that were really much more likely to swing to the Republicans there, even though the Democrats all left the state for the summer to try and avoid having to vote on it. But that has been stayed by a federal court, basically because someone in the Department of Justice, one of Trump's appointees, wrote a letter saying, we're doing this on racial terms, you know. And of course, one of the things that's very much not allowed is to do gerrymanders to reduce the power of minority voters. A bit illegal, maybe?

26:25Under the Voting Rights Act, we're against that. And so probably should not have put that in writing. At the moment, Justice Alito and the Supreme Court has let that map go forward for now, but it's not nailed on that that will happen. So that's five seats the Republicans were hoping to have. And then what happened in response to that is California, a very blue state, went, well, see how you like gerrymanders. becomes the gerrymandee. And they've come up with a new map that adds five Democratic-leaning seats. And in California, they had to vote on this. And they love a ballot measure. So Gavin Newsom, who very much does want to be president, put this to the people.

27:01The only people opposing it, really, was Arnie, who was very in favour of the independent redistricting. But he came out and said, terminate the gerrymander, and then didn't really do any other campaigning. So Gavin Newsom won. And so sure enough, you're in a situation where the Texas one might not go through. The California one definitely has gone through. And then places like Indiana, Donald Trump is massively pressuring the lawmakers there. But I thought this was an interesting information point. There's an Indiana state senator who responded very badly to Trump's true social post over Thanksgiving in which he called Kamala Harris's running mate Tim Walsh.

27:40He said he was retarded because of all the things that he was doing in Minnesota. and this guy did a tweet that said I've got a daughter with Down syndrome words have consequences I will be voting no on the gerrymander and this is very rare the Republican Party and particularly people at lower levels who don't want to get firebombed, I mean people in Indiana are talking about their threats to their physical safety don't oppose Donald Trump you know you get primaried by MAGA people or you get threats to your office and your home and this was interesting to me that this guy said oh I'm sorry there are still some lines in American politics we don't use language like that.

28:15I wonder if it's the first cracks beginning to show and a lot of people thinking we're going to get walloped in the midterms, the incumbent party traditionally does. And at some point, unless he really does run for third term, we're looking forward to this post-Trump future. Six months, a year ago, it looked completely hopeless for the Democrats, but this is the kind of thermostatic equilibrium of politics. So when asked last month, who is the Democrats' leader, do you know who won? Have a guess. Well, I'd say Newsom, Gavin Newsom, Governor of California has the most name recognition. Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama.

28:52No. Oprah. Don't know. Oh, yeah. Don't know came in a thumping 21%. 16 % did say Kamala Harris. In third place, nobody. So... Don't know Kamala Harris. Don't know nobody. Isn't that the answer to the who leads your party? Actually, that's true. Maybe Kamala Harris has got, she's not got anything else. So maybe she could run for the leadership of your party. So just for any international listeners to this podcast, we have a party in the UK called Your Party, which is our newest party. It's a very left-wing party, maybe explicitly a socialist party. So, you know, hugely exciting, got a lot of grassroots energy behind it.

29:33And the two leaders are Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sultana. And just for international listeners, I would say, imagine Bernie Sanders and AOC, but a very cut price version of that and they do not get along. But also they're not the two co-leaders as a result of this.

29:52Saba Salman:Which is probably a good thing because they really don't get on with each other. So they've had a conference in which they've elected not to have a leader. At least they've agreed on that though. It's the one thing they agreed on that they won't have a leader. They'll have co-leaders that are chosen by a long process that starts with an executive committee. they will allow people to be members of other parties as well as them it's going to be tricky because we've been talking a lot on this podcast the last couple of weeks about the success of the greens under zach polanski and that is a party that moved from a dual leader model to just going maybe let's just let one guy or one woman have a crack at it and then it'll be a lot more easy to identify the party with a person and a set positions the thing i would say that i really took away from watching maybe too much of the live stream of the your party conference is that there is a difficult split between the anti-colonialist pro-Palestine bits of the coalition and the socially liberal younger whiter activist part of the coalition so already two members of the Gaza independence two Muslim MPs male Muslim MPs resigned from your party say essentially because they're more socially conservative they said they had some concerns about like the definition of woman all that kind of stuff and they were repeatedly attacked from the podium as being transphobes by younger members.

31:05And the chair kept having to say, well, actually, we're here to debate the standing orders. Right, right, right. But those are the two who've already left, the splitters. Yeah. And that's sort of also a bit where, I mean, Corbyn sits uneasily between the two groups, right? And he did, when he was leader of the Labour Party, have to bridge this divide. But essentially, your party grew out of these Gaza independents, five male Muslim MPs plus Jeremy Corbyn. And then Zahra Sultana, who is also from that background, but is much more socially liberal. Gen Z about it kind of bolted onto that and it's a slightly unhappy mixture

31:38Saba Salman:She boycotted the first day of your party's conference didn't she? Yeah And that was specifically over, this amused me the problem always for parties on the left and for the left side of Labour has always been entryism and kind of Trotskyist sex trying to sort of worm their way in through membership and then affect things in that way She was saying specifically right at the outset we've got to have entryism, anyone from any socialist workers party, whatever other Trotskyists want, they've got to be a part of it and that's got to be part of the foundation of the party is that we allow these people in.

32:03Saba Salman:So good luck trying to decide anything with no leader and a committee in charge and then a load of different parties kind of were in the way in there as well. Didn't she also say that it's a 40-year project, this movement? So maybe by then they'll have agreed. That's good, like the years in the desert. Yeah, so it's not a quick fix. You know, this is a long-term... Pretty sure that's what Change UK was saying back in the day. Do you remember them? Jeremy's going to be 114 years old by the time this 40-year project is... I'll still be making the same speech. I'll still be chanting, I'm Jeremy Corbyn.

32:34Saba Salman:It'll be fine. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Bruise Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just$200 down at BKFSEA.com. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide, Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero.

33:19Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver colon BKFC 94 Till vs. Romero Watch it live only on DAZN Sign up now at DAZN.com Now, as the party winds down No, it's only winding up because there's something incredibly exciting happening in British media, isn't there Adam? This is huge Yeah

33:50Saba Salman:It's the sale of the Telegraph How long have we been talking about this? Has this actually been running longer than this podcast now the attempt to sell off the Telegraph? It's quite, yeah, you do get this sort of sense of, oh gosh, are they? It's like seeing someone... It was July 2023 when Lloyds Bank swooped in and said to the Barclay family, you can't pay your debts anymore, we're going to take your newspapers off of you. So the Telegraph has been languishing without an owner for a good couple of years now, and there have been various bids that have come and gone. It's emerged in the last few days that the new prospective owner of the Telegraph, he's put in a bid is Viscount Rothamir, current owner of the Daily Mail and the parent company, the Daily Mail and General Trust.

34:33Can I have a quick recap? So basically after that happens, they then try and sell it to a Qatari backed fund.

34:40Saba Salman:No, no, no. Initially Lloyds Bank tried to put it up for auction. Before they could do that, a fund called Redbird IMI swept in and said we will pay off the debts of the Barclays in return for receiving the newspapers and at that point The Spectator as well, the magazine. in kind of security for those debts. Then the government intervened because there were protests across the newspaper industry and from journalists on the Telegraph themselves saying we can't possibly have a fund which is backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates coming in and taking control of a British newspaper and everyone agreed this would be terrible.

35:14Saba Salman:So the whole thing was frozen. Ever since then, the Telegraph has been effectively being run by some independent directors who were people brought in by the bank in the first place, so not people who necessarily know much about running newspapers, which has effectively meant that editorially they've been allowed to go completely feral and do whatever they wanted to do, which they have taken on with great gusto under editor Chris Evans. They've been, to my reckoning, too further. Not Chris Evans, the DJ, or the one who was Captain America. No, it is the Captain America one. Oh, it is Captain America, right, OK.

35:44They might have done a better job. But this is a very interesting point that we've made somehow in all three sections, is the Telegraph have not really had a leader. well they've run lots of leaders over the last two and a half years you've got the your party thing you know you've got we've got a sense emerging this is your policy of actually

36:01Saba Salman:you always come back to the Belgian government where they didn't have one for three years everything was fine what if we just am I an anarchist? no but there was a terror cell in Belgium and I remember thinking oh maybe actually a year and a half is too long not to have a government and there's Alistair Heath and Alison Pearson at the Telegraph so I mean okay the rough equivalent but look the ancient history is over our slightly unstable friend has finally found a new man and the new man she's found is Viscount. One of the old people who were originally going to bid for it in the first place. Viscount Rothamere who tried to go out with our friend.

36:33I'm going to continue the analogy 20 years ago. He tried to buy the papers but didn't manage to.

36:38Saba Salman:He's had two goes so far. He tried to buy them originally when the Barclays got them from Conrad Black, that other interesting businessman, in 2004 when he lost control of the telegraph group. He came back for another go at the initial auction before it went to the UAE. At that point, as I said, the law was changed so that no foreign state would be able to take a stake in a newspaper initially. At that point, the Daily Mail group, Lord Rothermere's group, dropped out because they were talking to the Qataris and to various other governments in the Middle East about bringing some money in to make a bid for them at that point.

37:09Saba Salman:That law has now been tweaked so that foreign governments are allowed to take 15 % of a British newspaper group now. But Lord Rothermere, back, back, back, is saying that he's not going to need any foreign state funding at all. None of that will be involved, which does beg the question, where is the money actually coming from? Because the other strange thing about this is that he appears to be offering the full 500 million, which the current sort of impotent owners who aren't allowed to do anything for it want to pay back what they paid in the first place. But no one thinks it's worth that, right?

37:41Saba Salman:Even the Telegraph had been admitting that they are not worth that. They've been saying that a more realistic valuation of the newspaper group is sort of 300 to 350 million. Why is he offering the full app then? Sorry to ask a really basic question. It is a very odd question, isn't it? Most of us barter. Yeah, yeah, it does seem a lot. I mean, the Telegraph is profitable if he's looking at a long-term kind of investment in it. You know, there are ways of making that money back. There will be obvious, as we like to call them in the business world, synergies, or as we like to call them in the journalism world, lots of people getting sacked, particularly if I were working in the sort of back room kind of things of the IT departments or HR or the business side of either of those newspapers.

38:21Or even the picture desk and the subs desk, right? Like that's the classic, let's integrate the back room.

38:25Saba Salman:I was going to kind of come on to that because the other thing that's been going on at the Daily Mail group over the last year as chronicled in the Street of Shame pages since January is massive job cuts at the Daily Mail which is Britain's best-selling newspaper and still sells an enormous number of copies. so the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and the newspaper website formerly known as the Mail Online now known as dailymail.co.uk was sort of shunted together and a load of duplications and staff got rid of at that point in January they've since made big job cuts at all the other places that they own as well so that's the IE newspaper which people sort of forget is part of the Mail Group it's in a sort of separate wing of the company to be kept separate along with New Scientist which they also own and then last week literally a day before it emerged that he was offering hundreds and billions of pounds for the daily telegraph journalists at the metro were told that an awful lot of them were also at risk of redundancy because they need to make massive cost savings uh kind of across the board again those cost savings probably still not quite enough to raise that 500 million we're talking about here is the idea to try and create sort of another massive media block in the style of rupert murdoch's you know, Times, Sun, formerly News of the World, and Sky, all of that.

39:37Saba Salman:It's going to be much, much bigger than anything Rupert Murdoch has ever owned. Rupert Murdoch was an enormous fuss back in the 80s when he took over the Times and it was involved with the Monopolies and Mergers Commission as then because he was going to be taking over two major daily newspapers and three Sunday newspapers. This we'll bring together when we've just mentioned them. It's going to be four separate daily newspapers and a couple of Sundays as well. So in terms of a block and in terms of circulation as well, Press Gazette has done some calculations. They're going to be a million ahead of Murdoch's titles in terms of circulation.

40:08Saba Salman:Combined circulation of everything, if this deal goes through and the mail group take over the Telegraph and keep all of the titles they've got at the moment, 2.5 million copies a day they're going to be selling. The other thing that's changed enormously, of course, is paper circulation is a very different piece now to what it was in the 1980s. These are all essentially digital operations, you know, they're websites and a lot of them are international facing. and Rothermere has said specifically that the Telegraph, that's the bit he sees as ripe for exploitation. They're going to turn it into very much an American-facing thing.

40:36Saba Salman:They think there's a big market out there for a slightly classier-than-Fox News, kind of broad, sheety type, but very, very right-wing coverage, which is the direction the mail is moving in. It's quite MAGA at the moment under Chris Evans. But the Telegraph's the sort of ABC1 version of that, isn't it? That's the kind of heritage foundation sort of for the elites, you know, for the kind of... The Telegraph always used to be known as the paper for the retired colonel in the shires. And those people in the American context now are MAGA, right? Whereas the American male is still pursuing its very strongly aimed at particularly lower middle class women, right?

41:11Saba Salman:I think they'd see their competition as being things like People magazine and US Weekly. They're much more kind of celeb focused on their American kind of facing stuff. So I think if they've got any sense, and certainly Ron May is talking about keeping them as two very separate and distinct businesses. although obviously there will be those combinations to be done on staffing between the two of them. Politically they're coming from a sort of similar sort of area. Can I just check, is Sir Herbert Gusset now MAGA? If he's retired Colonel Herbert Gusset, you know, 5th platoon of the whatevers, then yeah, he's got a massive American flag in his driveway, he's in an SUV, he's in the Gusset wagon which does about like two miles to the gallon.

41:51his grandchildren definitely bought him one of those

41:53Saba Salman:red man hats a few Christmases ago and got him to pose for a selfie wearing it backwards awkwardly didn't they I just like the idea of the sidebar of shame in the Telegraph website yeah I don't think lots of retired colonels packing on the PDA I mean but presumably when this was first mooted this merger Lord Rothermere wrote a piece in the Times which was a sort of weird thing to see that happening or was interviewed in the Times saying essentially his argument was thing is no one reads newspapers anymore so it's fine if I own loads of them. I think that was an encapsulation of the argument. We've got a strange situation where the Telegraph is saying we're not worth all this money and the man who wants to buy them is saying no one's interested in newspapers anymore.

42:32But people are getting their news from a really wide range of sources like TikTok and social media so although this looks like it's edging close not to a monopoly but certainly to a huge market share it isn't really. But those things are not quite market in the same way. That's the thing. It is likely that Lisa Nandy, the Secretary

42:51Saba Salman:of State for Culture, Media and Sport is going to intervene in this one and probably as happened with the last big takeover we had was when Trinity Mirror took over the Express titles to create Reach PLC and she ordered investigations by the Competition Markets Authority and Ofcom into that and then the effect that that would have on the market. That was way through again that was an enormous share of the market. That was way through partly because those papers were kind of at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Daily Mirror traditionally Labour supporting, Express traditionally, very sort of traditionally old school conservative, hasn't really carried on that way, given that they're sharing enormous numbers of their pages now and have kind of been shunted together in a way that is not working out brilliantly for all the journalists.

43:31Saba Salman:It's not a happy ship. It's very definitely. There's very few newspapers that are particularly happy ships at the moment, but certainly the ones owned by Reach PLC are particularly unhappy and slightly subaquatic at the moment. That said, though, it is a good sign about the healthiness of our press and democracy that Lisa Nandi will refer this to a kind of arm's length thing. whereas if you think about, we've talked about this in the last pod one of the things that Donald Trump has absolutely done is just blocked media mergers that he doesn't like because they've been mean to him personally so if this were America Lisa Nandy would be going I think we could stand to hear a few nice things about Lisa Nandy the Telegraph if you'd like to get approval for this Right Couple of things just to add to that we've talked about how most readership has migrated online and the difficulties of measuring that which is something that Lisa Nandy is going to have to get her head around in terms of profits an enormous amount of it still comes from sales of paper copies of newspapers.

44:21Saba Salman:It's something like 75 % of the reach titles. I think it's up there. Telegraph, I think it's something like 80%. Really? It's an enormous amount of money still comes. They've got expensive now newspapers. And you've got a kind of loyal readership who are getting them delivered to their door every day still. They are an older readership. They are, sadly, you know, the nature of mortality means they're not going to be around for all that much longer. So that is always going down. But that is certainly what brings the money in. Much, much more than any online advertising in this country has ever done.

44:45Saba Salman:one of the reasons everyone is keen on exploiting an American market for British newspapers and all of them now have uh certainly all of the tabloids have launched specific US facing websites which are sort of separate operations to the British ones is that in America there's some valuable advertising out there which people are willing to put on on on newspaper and and magazine websites uh you can actually make some money off online advertising out here which is a thing that no one has ever ever found a way of making work over here it is also the case isn't it that quite a lot of people in the States like reading about rainy porridge island.

45:20I think that's a... Well, they like that and they like reading about

45:23Saba Salman:the hellhole that is London or Birmingham and how we're all living under Sharia law as well. There is a big sale of how awful the old country has become. Those of us that still live here because the rest of us are off to Dubai, aren't we? Absolutely, we are. You can't overstate that. There is a kind of weird place for Britain in the American, like, American Maga right imagination. I mean, to the extent that Elon Musk described us as being like the hobbits in the Shire. Therefore, we didn't realise that the orcs were coming and Sauron was coming, right? And they need to be defended by the men of Gondor, which I think is him with a Tesla.

45:57Oh, he wishes he was Aragorn, doesn't he? He's barely Gimli. Man in charge of army of trolls. Yeah. Meets back on the menu, lads.

46:07Saba Salman:Sorry. And the other thing I would just say is that the future does seem to be these larger and larger media groups and these huge huge takeovers. I mean even to come back to Rupert Murdoch he realised a few years ago that with Fox and Sky he was just not at the sort of scale where he could compete with the really big streamers and the really big studios. Fox was sold on to Disney, Sky to Comcast. Now we've got Sky as part of Comcast looking at buying up ITV, their broadcast sort of thing. So I think the future seems to be in everything getting bigger and bigger in order to compete with those tech giants like like kind of Facebook and Google and people like that.

46:40Saba Salman:So we're going to see a lot more, I think, of this kind of like consolidation and growth of media brands going on. Well, I, for one, I'm just hugely relieved that the Telegraph's going to be owned by someone at least at Viscount level. I just think that feels like a sort of... You're reassured by that. It's as it should be, isn't it? And it's settled for a baronet, but I'm reassured. OK, that's it for this episode of Page 94. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Adam, Helen and Sabah. If you would like more Private Eye in your life, The thing to do is go to your local news agent or TG Jones.

47:11Just thought I'd give them a little shout out and buy a copy. If you want to find out even more, you can go to private-i.co.uk and get yourself a subscription. What a good Christmas present it would make for someone in your life. Or even the annual, I hear. Oh, what a good idea. If you have two friends in your life, that's all your Christmas problem sorted, isn't it? Easy. Brilliant. We'll be back again in a fortnight with another of these. And the only remaining thanks are to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

47:43The inaugural Bruise Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just$200 down at BKFSEA.com. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Colon.

48:30BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Andy and Anna here from your new favourite podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish. Yes, we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis. You got any good facts, Andy? Yes, how about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious, wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs.

49:15So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are No Such Thing As A Fish.