We've all done it. One moment, you're playing The Elder Scrolls 3. Then, boom, you pass the thrust and everything implodes. Thankfully, the latest update to OpenMW - the open source engine reimplementation that's one of the the best ways to play Morrowind on modern hardware - includes measures to stop this thrusting from accidentally breaking the game.
The UK government have announced a ban on social media platforms for British people under the age of 16, encompassing Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X.com (known hereabouts as MechaHitler.com or Xitter, among other lousy putdowns). The ban is expected to come into force in spring 2027, and will have far-reaching impacts on ye olde videogame discourse, because people do so love to share and talk about games on social media.
The under-16s ban will also directly apply to certain gaming "services", though prime minister Keir Starmer and his minions have yet to specify which. It won't, apparently, "affect the ability for children to participate in multiplayer games online".
“We’re at the point where the Telegraph are literally making up quotes. I said when veg is sold for pennies in supermarkets, it’s a sign someone’s not being paid properly. Farmers being paid a pittance for their produce. Workers on less than a living wage in supermarkets.
“Sections of the media are just absolute bullshit. They’ve always been a problem – but now they’re literally lying and making up things that have never been said. The only way to defeat the billionaire media is to organise around them.”
And supporters agreed with his assessment.
One commenter wrote: “You’re right Zack. It’s hard not to react, but keep going in correcting them and moving on.”
Another added: “I see the spin on Zack’s words, I knew there would be more to this, so checked out what Zack really said and of course it made sense.”
The controversy stems from a Telegraph headline that declared: “Zack Polanski: Food is too cheap.” The article opens by stating that “Zack Polanski has said food is too cheap and called for new rules to force supermarkets to pay suppliers more.”
Yet the article itself went on to explain that Polanski had been discussing vegetables being sold for as little as 7p, arguing that such prices point to exploitation somewhere within the food supply chain.
Speaking to the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union, Polanski said:
“That is not a sign of a healthy system. Someone is being exploited somewhere, and if you’re paying 7p for vegetables, then something is not right.
It is those supermarket bosses who are taking record profits … meanwhile paying their workers poverty wages. We cannot go on like this.”
He also called for tighter regulation of supermarkets, arguing that the sector has “not been regulated enough” and is exploiting “both the workers in the supermarkets and the farmers and agricultural workers.”
Polanski supports a £15 minimum wage and a proposed 10-to-one pay ratio that would limit how much more senior executives can earn compared with their lowest-paid employees.
Taken at face value, those remarks are not an argument that food prices in general should rise. Rather, they are an argument that extraordinarily low prices for some products may reflect unfair treatment of workers and producers elsewhere in the supply chain. Concerns about low pay, corporate profits and exploitation have long been central themes of both Polanski’s politics and Green Party policy.
And, Polanski was speaking specifically about vegetables being sold at exceptionally low prices, yet the Telegraph misleadingly broadened this into a claim about “food” as a whole.
While the use of single quotation marks indicates a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation, many readers may not appreciate that distinction. The result is a headline that conveys a much stronger and more sweeping claim than the one Polanski actually made.
Made at a time when millions of households are struggling with the cost of living and food insecurity remains a major issue, any suggestion that a politician wants food prices to increase is likely to attract a strong reaction.
Unsurprisingly, other right-wing outlets quickly followed the Telegraph’s lead.
The Spectator ran with the headline: “Polanski pushes price hikes.”
“When he’s not ranting about Gaza, Zack Polanski is mostly to be found despairing about the cost of living. And aren’t we all?” fumed Steer Pike, adding:
“The Green leader has made a series of economically illiterate suggestions about how he would bring down prices for struggling Brits and improve the dire state of the economy.
“Which makes his intervention on food prices today all the more bizarre. The intrepid Green leader, in all his glory, has called for the cost of supermarket goods to rise. That’s right: Polanski fumed that the likes of veggies are far too cheap.”
Yet this interpretation depends on accepting the original Telegraph framing. Polanski’s actual comments focused on exploitation within the supply chain and the gap between supermarket profits and workers’ wages. Whether one agrees with his proposed solutions or not, that’s a different argument from simply declaring that “food is too cheap”.
What Polanski said was clear: if vegetables are being sold for pennies, somebody in the chain is likely paying the price. What appeared in the headlines, was something else entirely.
Britain feels more divided than it did five years ago. Trust is low, political tempers are high, and nostalgia for a supposedly golden past is growing. Research by King’s College London and Ipsos suggests concerns about immigration, identity and cultural change have intensified since 2020.
GB News didn’t create these anxieties but it has spent the past five years amplifying them.
Since launching on June 13, 2021, the channel has become an influential force in British political media, building an audience around culture-war conflict, anti-elite rhetoric and a constant stream of stories presenting immigration, net zero and social change as symptoms of national decline. What began as a self-styled insurgency against a supposedly liberal broadcasting establishment has evolved into something else: a political platform with growing influence over Britain’s right.
The channel still claims to speak for the ‘silent majority.’ Yet its most prominent voices are politicians, former politicians, wealthy business figures and media personalities, with Nigel Farage its defining star.
Five years on, the real story of GB News is not whether it disrupted British broadcasting. It’s how a channel built on resentment, nostalgia and permanent cultural conflict helped reshape the terms of Britain’s political debate.
A catalogue of outrage
We only have to look over past editions of Right-Wing Media Watch to ascertain exactly how inciting GB News actually is, with recurring fixations on immigration, crime, ‘woke’ institutions, climate policies, and alleged attacks on free speech.
Immigration is a particular obsession, with segments regularly portraying migration as a source of national decline and social disorder.
In one notable example, presenter Martin Daubney launched into a tirade about “lunatics” taking over the asylum system while discussing a case involving a convicted fraudster.
During another broadcast, political commentator Thomas Corbett-Dillon suggested there was “a genocide happening” against white people in England and warned that immigrants could one day “turn” on the white population.
Research by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring found that during coverage of the far-right riots in 2024, GB News accounted for 62 percent of all clips across UK news channels that linked Muslims to the violence. The report concluded that the broadcaster repeatedly framed Muslims as perpetrators rather than victims, downplayed attacks on mosques and Muslim communities, and reinforced a hostile and one-sided narrative.
As RWW pointed to at the time, a study which found that people who regularly watch GB News are more likely to hold misconceptions about immigration, specifically, the belief that net migration to the UK is increasing, despite official statistics showing the opposite.
Climate science – a favourite punch bag
Climate policy is another major source of editorial outrage.
The channel has become a prominent platform for climate scepticism and anti-net-zero campaigning. Nigel Farage has dismissed the classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant as “nuts,” while other presenters routinely frame climate policies as economically ruinous or ideologically driven.
And such views extend beyond its presenters. Sir Paul Marshall, the channel’s co-owner, recently claimed that Britain had been infected with what he called “climate derangement syndrome.”
Research by DeSmog found that around the 2024 general election, GB News aired at least 953 anti-climate attacks. 74 of those came from current or former representatives of Reform UK and its predecessor, the Brexit Party. Contributors variously described net zero as a “cult,” a “monster” and a threat to Britain’s prosperity.
A financial black hole
Yet for all the talk of disrupting the media landscape, the channel remains a remarkably costly enterprise.
The broadcaster’s latest accounts show a further £22 million loss during the most recent financial year. Although losses have narrowed, the channel has still burned through extraordinary sums of money. Total losses now stand at approximately £131 million for owners, hedge fund manage Sir Paul Marshall and Legatum Ventures, since it launched in 2021.
The channel’s financial struggles have been compounded by a long-running advertiser boycott. Since its launch, dozens of major brands have distanced themselves from GB News. IKEA said it had “not knowingly” advertised on the channel, while Vodafone, Specsavers, LV, Bosch and Pinterest all withdrew advertising within weeks of its debut.
One of the most surreal episodes came when Laurence Fox, later sacked by GB News following comments about a female journalist, announced he would return an award he had received from Specsavers in protest at the company’s decision to withdraw advertising.
Yet reporting of the broadcaster’s finances often comes wrapped in optimism, obscuring the extent to which GB News remains dependent on substantial shareholder funding. Press Gazette’s coverage, for example, highlighted audience growth and increasing revenues. Less attention was paid to the fact that GB News continues to require substantial injections of shareholder cash simply to remain operational.
Its parent company, All Perspectives Ltd, provided a further £17.7 million in funding during the year ending May 2025, taking the total backing for the venture to around £141 million.
‘Toothless’ Ofcom
The figures make something of a mockery of recent claims by former Ofcom chairman Michael Grade that rival broadcasters are somehow “embarrassed” by GB News’s success. Established broadcasters would indeed be embarrassed by losses on this scale, but unlike GB News, they are accountable to shareholders, members or public service obligations that would not tolerate such sustained financial haemorrhaging.
Grade’s repeated interventions on GB News’ behalf also reinforce concerns that Ofcom has been unwilling to hold the channel to the same standards as other broadcasters. By May 2023, more than 4,500 complaints had been lodged against GB News since its launch. Yet in November 2023, Grade insisted that Ofcom did not want to be “in the business of telling broadcasters… who they can employ.”
In 2025, a presenter on the channel’s discussion programme Headliners repeated the dangerous falsehood relating LGBTQ+ people to paedophilia. A record 71,582 people used the Good Law Project’s online tool to submit complaints. Confronted with the largest volume of complaints in its history, Ofcom finally opened an investigation in March. Seven months later, it concluded that GB News had breached the Broadcasting Code.
Online audience falls
The broadcaster insists it remains “on track” to become Britain’s biggest news channel by 2028. Recent audience figures, however, cast doubt over that ambition. Monitoring by Press Gazette of UK news websites found that GB News recorded one of the steepest year-on-year declines in audience reach. Its reach fell by around 35 percent, placing it among the five biggest fallers and behind only Healthline Media, Chronicle Live, MyLondon and Examiner Live.
Television and radio audiences, meanwhile, increased by 53 percent and 61 percent respectively, according to BARB and RAJAR data.
GB News predictably presents such figures as evidence that it is outperforming rivals. But selective use of statistics has long been one of the channel’s habits. In 2021, for example, it promoted a poll suggesting the BBC was more biased than itself. Less prominently disclosed was the fact that the poll had been commissioned by GB News.
From GB News to ‘Farage News’
Yet GB News’ real magnitude extends beyond ratings, revenue or even controversy. Its greatest influence may lie in the role it plays in shaping political narratives around the man who could yet become Britain’s prime minister – Nigel Farage.
The Clacton MP has become the channel’s biggest star. He is paid almost £98,000 per month for presenting duties amounting to around 32 hours of airtime, earning approximately £1.18 million annually from the broadcaster.
That investment appears to have shaped editorial priorities. The channel has repeatedly portrayed Farage and Reform UK as victims of establishment hostility. When the National Education Union prepared to debate motions concerning the rise of the far right, the channel leapt to Reform’s defence, framing the discussion as evidence that teachers were attempting to indoctrinate children against Reform UK.
Coverage routinely depicts criticism of Farage’s party as unfair smears while presenting Reform as the target of ideological persecution. The result is a broadcaster that resembles a campaigning outlet rather than an independent news organisation.
Even some of GB News’ earliest architects recognise the shift. Andrew Neil, the channel’s founding chairman and original lead presenter, abandoned the project shortly after launch, fleeing back to the south of France amid technical hitches that literally made the station unwatchable. Speaking to the New World earlier this year for an investigation into the extent to which GB News has breached Ofcom’s broadcasting rules, Neil drew a comparison with Fox News’ relationship to Donald Trump.
“Just as Fox basically became the channel of Donald Trump, it’s clear they have turned GB News into the Reform channel. I think they see themselves as in the vanguard of the Reform movement,” he said.
That verdict is difficult to dispute. The investigation, meanwhile, determined that, almost by stealth, Reform UK has effectively ended up with its own TV station, while the broadcasting regulator appears to have more of less “given up the ghost.”
“And Nigel Farage is laughing all the way to the bank,” the report states.
Five years on
Five years after launch, GB News remains a paradox.
It presents itself as a rebellious outsider while relying on wealthy backers to absorb enormous financial losses. It claims to challenge elite consensus while providing a platform for hedge fund managers, former ministers and leading political figures. It markets itself as a news channel while functioning as a vehicle for Reform UK and its politics.
The station has undoubtedly found an audience. But its lasting legacy may not be as a successful challenger to the broadcasting establishment. Instead, it may be remembered as the channel that blurred the line between news, activism, and political campaigning more than any major broadcaster in modern British history.
Five years in, GB News is no longer merely covering Britain’s culture wars. It’s become one of their most powerful participants.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
The UK’s mainstream legacy press is predominantly right to extreme right wing. Despite reductions in physical newspaper sales and the shift online, right-wing media (RWM) still dominates the news arena with a significantly larger reach than left and centre news publications.
This right-wing ascendancy has been further boosted by the GB News “soapbox” which, together with the usual suspects (the Express, Sun and Mail), provide Reform mouthpieces. There’s also been a shift further right in previously more neutral publications, notably the Telegraph and Times.
Adherence to standards of impartiality and scrutiny is now often token and in “power struggles over our ears and eyeballs” shared by influencers like Mr Beast.
Unsurprisingly, the UK now ranks a rather shameful 18th in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index with uncomfortable similarities to Orban’s Hungary. Around 70-80% of UK press media is owned by right-leaning wealthy oligarchs, as was Orban’s. Journalists have been censured using SLAPPS, regulatory appointments, digital surveillance and smear campaigns. And just as Hungary’s media became promotors of Orban’s party, Fidesz, so IPSO’s infamous toothlessness has hastened the corrosion of editorial neutrality, paving the way for the RWM to become ‘left-bashing’ Reform cheer leaders.
The heavily concentrated ownership of our news media by right-wing oligarchs is well documented. But we should look closely at how the RWM manipulates social attitudes and how we should respond.
Playtime and construction industries
The leading social media platforms (X, Facebook and Tiktok) enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the RWM in which news is mutually amplified and mediated. But despite algorithmic tailoring, much online content still flows from what the RWM decides to headline. It’s a primary, more authoritative lens through which we experience our political world on a day-to-day basis. We understand politicians not so much through what they do in the raw, or through social media noise, but through how the RWM frames them.
Framing is central to the RWM’s gladiatorial “sport” of making or breaking politicians their audacious profession renders them ‘fair game’.
This nihilistic modus operandi is common amongst the political commentariat. It’s perhaps inevitable though in a culture whose contributors, often from the same privileged education stables, are relegated to the side-lines. If their professional purpose is to comment rather than act, what’s left except to gameplay, exercising their tribal power over the actions of others?
This sport isn’t confined to the RWM, but the effects are proportional to its considerably greater reach; furthermore, its pernicious influence spans the RWM spectrum from the more subtle Times to the explicitly rage-baiting Daily Mail.
A good kicking in the name of scrutiny
RWM framing is powerful where we lack independent experience for comparison. We are generally dependent on the media for shaping our understanding of figures like Andy Burnham, Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski. With a clean slate, the RWM is largely free to construct political reality around these figures.
Polanksi’s popularity, like Burnham’s, is a RWM ‘red flag’. Their popularity is an excuse to set them up as able to ‘take the hit’. It affords a licence to discredit them under the guise of ‘extra hard-hitting scrutiny’, i.e. Trevor Phillips style ‘rottweiler attacks minus balance’.
Such grillings, delivered to a public who know little about either man, create impressions, piece by suspect piece, strongly predisposing them to negative evaluations.
Display stand labels
RWM framing relies heavily on labelling. ‘Hypnotist’, used as an early identifier for Polanski, formed a basis for further understanding, solidifying into beliefs about ‘untrustworthiness and inauthenticity’ through repetition and familiarity, and attracting other consonant labels which together formed a consistent mental ‘Polanski’ map.
Related high frequency descriptors used were: ‘actor, tax dodger, antisemite, drug legaliser, ‘narcissist’. This spicy wordplay assembled a mesh of attributes, lodging itself within social discourse and further shaping ‘Polanski’ as a faulty political type. Even as a debate, seeds were successfully planted. Such labels, splashed daily across supermarket and garage forecourt display stands, are the only prompts for some people on how to vote.
With ‘Polanski’ thus sculpted, counter-information can’t then land. Humanitarian concerns about Gaza or wealth inequality can legitimately be discussed by bodies like the UN. But out of Polanski’s mouth they are dangerous rantings.
Similarly, the Times’ strenuous efforts to portray Burnham as an unprincipled shapeshifter, minimally sows doubt amongst voters whose beliefs about him are less than rock solid.
Both politicians are ‘press clay pigeons’ – brittle flyers projected high into the political arena ready to be shot down.
The Times and others present the self-confessed ‘sexism’ of Robert Kenyan, not as the outright disqualification for becoming an MP it should be, but as showing he’s the ‘kind of normal bloke we need in politics’.
Similarly, the RWM’s interpretive dance around Farage’s alleged antisemitic behaviour and dodgy donations as ‘boyhood japes’ and ‘innocent gifts’ presents him as a blameless victim hounded by the left.
Meanwhile, behind the staggering level of voter ignorance about Reform’s ‘‘Great Repeal Bill’ is the RWM’s wilful determination not to spell out its implications for worker’s and women’s rights.
In covering the recent stabbings in Southampton and Ireland, the RWM ignored the data on ethnic crime rates and differential policing. Instead, the stabbings were presented as damning proof of the dangers posed by non-white ethnic groups, woke 2-tier policing and immigration controls, with the Mail, amongst others, treating Farage’s call for “cold rage” as a fair. These incendiary RWM narratives act like instruction manuals, shaping social comprehension about what the stabbings signify.
All the portrayals outlined above are just a tiny sample of the relentless brush strokes via which impressions of key politicians and events are drip fed and fleshed out.
Some consequences
The riots triggered by the stabbings were incited by Tommy Robinson and Musk-led online rhetoric. But the RWM fomented the violence by using its own more authoritative voice to ratify, rather than challenge it; also by attacking critics who ‘condemn the valid tinderbox of public rage’ as themselves the ‘real danger to society’.
Similarly, whilst the RWM’s response to Farage’s £5mn donation from Christopher Harborne was sluggish, they feasted on Raynor’s minor tax issue for months. The “tax scandal” caused a “tangible fall” in her popularity. Despite being found not guilty, the damage was done – the media assault worked.
It also worked against Polanski. Even if repeatedly kicking someone in the head is police protocol, Polanski’s reaction, if politically hasty, was probably natural, humane concern about brain-damage. But the RWM instead briskly spun it as ‘anti-police’ and, by initially omitting the other Muslim victim, absurdly, also as ‘antisemitic’. The ‘antisemite’ and ‘anti-police’ tags then caused Polanski’s approval to plummet 14 points, shifting from positive into the red overnight.
The RWM spots attack fissures in the left and leap in with the zest of piranhas.
The doorstep fallacy
The RWM can’t claim to mirror political reality since it constructs chunks of the content in the first place that it then allegedly ‘reflects’. Much of the doorstep Corbyn hostility it ‘found’, for example, was its own regurgitated narrative. Starmer has, in reality, made serious mistakes that aren’t simply conjured from press manoeuvres. But the RWM sets the agenda.
Starmer’s sticky ‘lame duck’ persona was consolidated by prioritising negative labels (weak, indecisive) and by pointed silence on positive achievements: knife crime down 10% in the last year, the stock market outperforming the US, NHS waiting lists lowest in 3.5 yrs, GDP up every quarter since 2024, the new Renters Rights Act, 30 hours weekly of funded childcare.
This suppression is why voters, when asked to list good Labour policies, famously stare blankly, struggling to answer.
Doorstep antipathy is also because Starmer has made monumental mistakes (and, arguably, should go). But ruthless RWM manipulation of success and failure narratives have massively intensified voter contempt. Labour’s 2026 local election performance would have been poor anyway. But media puppeteering turbo-charged the preposterous fall of Starmer’s popularity below Trump’s, and the catastrophic election results.
Weaving social understanding
Starmer is just another in the latest round of left-winged clay pigeons. This isn’t a Starmer endorsement, just an observation that our media could have played it very differently.
Starmer’s opponents, Johnson and Farage, are notorious censure escapologists. But it was the RWM that carefully curated the unscrutinized, charming, Teflon personalities we’re familiar with, and who orchestrated their success by cultivating fear narratives that shoved immigration to the top of the social issue league table.
The key point is that Like Orban’s media, our RWM shapes political understanding by labelling, redefining, insinuating, and quietly eviscerating whatever it wants to obliterate.
RWM narratives like those outlined here penetrate our social consciousness daily. By entrenching certain views whilst undermining others, they widen the right-wing demographic and hence work supremely well in furthering Reform’s trajectory as the new preferred political tribe.
This isn’t information delivery, or even ‘mildly politically biased’ news. It’s social engineering – on a massive scale, with deeply dysfunctional consequences.
Stop the sane washing
Yet we continue excusing our media because we assume it must somehow be working in our interest. Consequently, we despair when it keeps failing, as it does, every day.
It took Hungary 16 years to remove Orban, a process greatly assisted by their independent media. For UK politics to start functioning, we must turn away from our dominating RWM towards independent political journalism.
This largely Impress-regulated ecosystem, though economically fragile, speaks truth to power with integrity, producing responsible, exacting investigation and analysis. We must start fostering this vital independent voice because it belongs to us, not oligarchs, and has our human rights and our democracy as its lode stars.
Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass.
“I was just quietly getting on with my life and then the roof fell in. I just want to get back to how things were,” remarked a trans person following the Supreme Court case ruling in April 2025, that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.
The comment captures the reality many transgender people in Britain now face. For years, trans people lived largely outside the spotlight, navigating ordinary lives while seeking acceptance, healthcare and legal recognition. Today, however, they find themselves at the centre of one of the most fiercely contested political and cultural battles in the country.
Trans people represent a tiny fraction of the UK population, yet they occupy a remarkable amount of media and political attention. More often than not, that attention is not generated by trans people themselves, but by politicians, campaign groups and commentators, who frame transgender lives as a problem to be solved, sometimes even as some kind of threat to be dealt with.
A major new report from Amnesty International UK suggests this is no accident.
The research found that between January 2020 and April 2025, five of Britain’s largest newspapers, the Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, Guardian and the Sun, published approximately 17,000 articles on trans-related issues. That amounts to an average of 264 articles every month, or roughly nine every day.
The analysis showed that trans people themselves were largely absent from this coverage. Instead, politicians, commentators and anti-trans campaigners dominated the conversation, and, when trans people did appear, it was mostly as criminals or murder victims.
The Times and Sunday Times produced the highest volume of coverage, averaging more than 83 articles per month. While the Sun, which published the least, averaged 38 articles monthly.
This level of attention is extraordinary when viewed against the size of the population being discussed. According to the 2021 Census, approximately 262,000 people in England and Wales identified as transgender or had a gender identity different from their sex registered at birth, around 0.5% of the population.
Yet you’d struggle to find another issue affecting such a small minority that receives anything like comparable media attention.
A debate the public isn’t asking for
The intensity of coverage is also grossly disproportionate when you consider public priorities.
Ahead of the 2024 general election, issues relating to trans rights, gender identity and sex didn’t feature among voters’ top 16 concerns.
Nevertheless, media analysis found that questions of sex, gender and sexuality dominated reporting on so-called “culture war” topics in the weeks before the election.
So, while the public was primarily concerned with paying bills and accessing public services, much of the media and political class remained fixated on trans people.
As Amnesty’s gender justice programme director, Chiara Capraro, notes:
“There is nothing balanced about the way trans people’s lives are reported. Anti-trans narratives dominate coverage and are often presented as fact, while trans people themselves are pushed to the margins or erased entirely.” Capraro argues that this isn’t an organic development but the product of coordinated efforts to reshape public opinion and influence policy.
“The consequences are real, affecting trans people’s equality, safety and wellbeing across the UK.
“Trans people have become a lightning rod in wider culture wars, with harmful narratives amplified across powerful platforms, shaping public perceptions.”
How Britain’s anti-trans media campaign took shape
Amnesty argues that while transphobia predated today’s ‘gender critical’ (GC) movement, the movement itself can be traced back to 2017-2018, during public consultations by the Scottish and Westminster governments on reforming the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA).
Shortly before the Westminster consultation closed, the GC group Fair Play for Women took out a full-page advert in the Metro urging readers to oppose the reforms and providing a pre-filled consultation response. According to the government’s own analysis, more than 18,000 submissions used this template, accounting for around 18% of all responses.
Earlier research by trans rights activist MimmyMum also identifies 2017 as a turning point in British media coverage of transgender issues. Anti-trans reporting accelerated during debates over GRA reform, with particular focus on the role of the Times, especially through opinion columns by Janice Turner and reporting by Andrew Gilligan.
The pattern quickly spread across much of the national press, including the Telegraph and Daily Mail. Stories questioning trans rights increasingly became a reliable source of engagement, clicks and controversy. Even the traditionally liberal Guardian and Observer adopted a more trans-hostile tone, sparking internal staff disputes and contributing to the resignation of columnist Suzanne Moore in 2020 after she defended the view that biological sex is real and that stating so is not transphobic.
MimmyMum further argues that the BBC followed a similar path, claiming that BBC News coverage was influenced by senior gender-critical figures within the corporation.
What began as a niche policy debate soon became a recurring media obsession, creating the impression of a major national crisis despite the relatively small number of people directly affected.
Critics of this shift argue that it was never simply a spontaneous public debate. Trade unions themselves have long warned that transgender rights were being weaponised for political purposes. In 2020, the TUC Congress passed a motion stating that “a majority Conservative government is using trans rights as a wedge issue to divide working class people,” and “myths and tropes about trans and non-binary people are regularly being promoted in the Murdoch papers.”
Inevitably too, the issues became caught up in the deep state/free speech narratives, most famously when Father Ted’s co-creator Graham Linehan was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence against transgender people on social media. Totally predictably, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk piled in, seeing the arrest as yet more evidence of denying people the right to say whatever they liked. Eventually the police apologised to Linehan on the grounds of insufficient evidence of the incitement to violence charge.
The organisations behind the movement
Amnesty’s report also places the rise of anti-trans activism within a broader network of organisations campaigning against abortion rights, LGBTQ+ equality and gender equality.
Previous Amnesty research identified 65 organisations operating in this space, three-quarters of which are registered charities. Together, 32 of these organisations spent more than £106 million between 2019 and 2023.
Amnesty’s mapping found that out of more than 50 organisations campaigning to restrict the rights of trans people, only three existed prior to 2017, confirming the rapid growth of the movement in recent years.
The report also highlights the increasing influence of international networks, particularly those linked to the United States.
Among them is the UK branch of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who’s spending rose by 258% between 2019 and 2024.
ADF is best known for its role in legal campaigns that helped overturn Roe v. Wade in the United States and has supported efforts to restrict LGBTQ+ rights around the world.
Amnesty notes that the largest category of ‘gender critical’ organisations consists of employee networks across sectors including the civil service, education, healthcare and retail. Many of these groups are affiliated with the Sex Equality and Equity Network (SEEN), which states that it exists to support staff with gender-critical views and promote “sex equality” based on the belief that biological sex should not be conflated with gender identity.
Rather than emerging organically, opposition to trans rights was built through increasingly organised networks backed by substantial financial resources and political influence.
Real-life consequences
As anti-trans sentiment has intensified in Britain’s media, transphobic hate crime has continued to rise.
Home Office statistics show a marked rise in recorded transgender hate crimes after 2017, with the largest jump occurring between 2021 and 2022, when these crimes rose by 56% in a single year.
“Transgender hate crimes had been rising before the fall seen in the last year, and now account for 3% of all hate crimes recorded, up from 1% a decade ago (year ending March 2014).”
The most high-profile case was the murder of 16-year-old transgender girl Brianna Ghey in February 2023. Although her killing was not initially treated as a hate crime, evidence suggested transphobia played a role in motivating her attackers.
Journalist and legal researcher Jess O’Thomson argues that Britain’s media landscape has helped fuel a hostile environment for trans people.
“The media over here is also incredibly transphobic,” she said. “There’s a reason we’re referred to as TERF Island, and even the left-wing press has massive problems when it comes to trans inclusion.”
On the reporting of Brianna Grey, O’Thomson said she was struck by the gap between what emerged in court and how the case was covered.
“During the trial, sitting there in court and then reading the reporting of the people next to me, I felt like I was being gaslit. Because I was in court hearing this incredibly transphobic material, with none of it being reported on as transphobia during the trial, or even after the verdict.
She argues that the press “deliberately obscured” the role of transphobia in this case, masking the wider impact of anti-trans prejudice in British society.
The report the media barely mentioned
And on media downplaying, what I noticed when writing this week’s RWW, is how little attention Amnesty UK’s report received from the British media. A study examining the role of media in amplifying anti-trans narratives was itself largely ignored by the very institutions it scrutinised.
One of the few outlets to cover the report was UnHerd, through an article by freelance journalist Janet Murray. Murray is well known for her gender-critical views, having penned a piece in the Telegraph in April, headlined ‘Even mentioning JK Rowling’s name gets you cancelled by the pro-trans mob.’
Murray argues that Amnesty’s findings represent a decline in the organisation’s credibility, suggesting that the report resembled “a dossier on a dangerous extremist network” rather than an investigation into a movement campaigning against trans rights.
She criticised Amnesty’s conclusion that journalists should platform more trans voices, produce more positive stories about trans people and avoid sensationalist “gotcha” questions. For Murray, this was evidence of activism masquerading as human rights research.
Yet this response arguably illustrates Amnesty’s concerns rather than refuting them.
When weighed against the discrimination, harassment, hate crimes and violence experienced by many trans people, claims that gender-critical campaigners have suffered reputational damage for expressing their views are surely comparatively minor.
A minority turned into a scapegoat
Regardless of where individuals stand on the legal questions involved, one fact remains difficult to ignore: trans people have become a lightning rod for wider cultural anxieties.
A population representing less than one per cent of society has been transformed into a national obsession.
Through sustained media attention, political opportunism and well-funded campaigning networks, trans people have been elevated from a small minority seeking equal treatment into a symbolic battleground in Britain’s culture wars.
The transgender person who said they wanted life to return to normal was expressing a sentiment that many would recognise. Most people don’t want to be at the centre of a national debate. They simply want to live their lives. The tragedy is that much of Britain’s media seems unwilling to let them.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
Nothing bares the British psyche quite like a heatwave, where two consecutive days of sunshine are treated as a national triumph. The moment temperatures creep above 30C, newspapers abandon all restraint. Beaches become “Britain’s Costa del Sol,” filling a paddling pool becomes an act of patriotic defiance, and supermarket shortages of barbecue meat are treated like signs of national resilience.
“Hottest May day ever as mercury hits 35C,” splashed the Express this week, beside a beaming child at a Hertfordshire lido. Murdoch’s Sun, meanwhile, mocked water conservation advice under the headline: “PADDLING FOOLS!” after South West Water urged households to fill pools only halfway.
Certainly, water companies deserve scrutiny but what’s entirely absent from the coverage is the obvious question – why are Britain’s weather patterns becoming so extreme in the first place?
The answer, of course, is climate change, and what scientists describe as “climate whiplash,” that is rapid swings between prolonged drought and prolonged rainfall.
Across the world, these violent oscillations have intensified in recent decades. After the UK experienced its warmest summer on record in 2025, the winter of 2026 brought relentless rain, including 50 consecutive days of rainfall in parts of Devon and Cornwall, one of the wettest seasons on record.
Yet much of the British press treat these developments not as symptoms of climate instability, but as opportunities for weather hysteria. The focus remains on “glorious sunshine,” packed beaches, and joyless officials warning people to conserve water.
Even supposedly serious newspapers downplay the significance of the heat. The Times, also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire, led with photographs of Bournemouth beaches packed “like the Costa del Sol,” focusing on Britons “flocking to the coast” and zoo animals eating ice lollies. Readers were told temperatures were “glorious,” while the reasons such conditions are becoming more frequent, intense and dangerous, were conveniently left out.
The Murdoch effect
Perhaps none of this should surprise us. Rupert Murdoch has long expressed scepticism towards climate action. Scientists have described the media baron as a “climate villain,” whose outlets consistently promote denial, distraction, and political inertia.
“It’s hard to think of another person who has single-handedly done more to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change,” said Dr Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist at Australian National University.
“We have wasted decades debating the fundamental science in the media, when we really should have been focused on urgently implementing climate policies that will genuinely reduce emissions.
“Murdoch will be looked back on by historians as someone who used their media monopoly to influence the destabilisation of the Earth’s climate.”
Indeed, the impact extends beyond headlines. Media narratives don’t merely reflect public opinion, they shape it. They influence what voters fear, what politicians prioritise, and which policies become politically toxic.
That transformation is particularly striking because climate action wasn’t always politically divisive on the British right. For decades, there was broad consensus across the mainstream political spectrum that climate change was real and required serious action.
Even Margaret Thatcher, a science graduate, warned in the late 1980s about global warming, pollution and ecological destruction, delivering speeches to the Royal Society and the United Nations that the BBC later described as showing “crackling environmental passion.”
John Major supported environmental protections during his premiership. David Cameron attempted to modernise the Conservative Party around green politics, promising the “greenest government ever.” Even Boris Johnson, despite years of sceptical newspaper columns, ultimately embraced ambitious climate legislation ahead of COP26, building on Theresa May’s legally binding commitment to net zero by 2050.
Today, it’s difficult to imagine any of those leaders receiving fair treatment from the right-wing press.
From conservatism to culture war
Analysis by Carbon Brief found that UK newspapers published nearly 100 editorials opposing climate action in 2025, the highest number since tracking began in 2011. The hostility came predominantly from right-wing outlets such as the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. Renewable energy, net-zero targets and environmental regulations were increasingly portrayed not as long-term economic necessities, but as elite ideological obsessions imposed on ordinary people.
The attacks also became deeply personal. Carbon Brief identified 112 editorials targeting energy secretary Ed Miliband in 2025 alone, repeatedly mocking him as a fanatic pursuing a ruinously expensive agenda rather than advocating policies Britain itself once championed across party lines.
This hostility coincided with a shift inside the Conservative Party itself. Under Liz Truss, the government briefly lifted the fracking ban. Rishi Sunak delayed the phaseout of petrol vehicles and gas boilers while approving around 100 new oil and gas licences. Under Kemi Badenoch, the party has gone further still, openly questioning the viability of Britain’s net-zero commitments and proposing to repeal key climate legislation once championed by Conservatives themselves.
The right-wing climate denial ecosystem
Right-wing climate denial operates like a classic propaganda conveyor belt, a process we’ve explored before on RWW. A free-market think tank such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), long criticised for publishing material that downplays the seriousness of climate change, releases a piece of supposedly authoritative “research.” That report is then eagerly amplified by right-wing media outlets and injected into the public discourse as fact, with little or no scrutiny.
In January this year, for instance, the IEA published an error-strewn pamphlet on ‘The Cost of Net Zero,’ which received prominent coverage across several newspapers, including a front-page splash in the Daily Express.
As the London School of Economics observed, the pamphlet was largely covered by political reporters rather than specialist environment or energy correspondents, meaning its fundamental errors went largely unchallenged.
America’s influence on Britain’s climate backlash
And the British climate debate is becoming steadily more Americanised, increasingly shaped by US-style right-wing populism.
For years, the US right has transformed climate change from a scientific issue into a cultural identity battle, driven by fossil fuel lobbying networks, partisan media outlets and libertarian think-tanks. That same infrastructure is now influencing British conservatism.
Nigel Farage and Reform UK have become central to that shift. Reform has abandoned even rhetorical support for climate consensus, framing net zero as an attack on ordinary people while promoting familiar climate-sceptic talking points, that climate change is simply natural variation, that CO2 is harmless because plants need it, and that emissions are insignificant because carbon dioxide forms only a tiny percentage of the atmosphere.
The language closely echoes decades of messaging developed by the American climate denial movement.
Investigations by DeSmog have highlighted growing links between Reform figures and the Heartland Institute, a US organisation that has described itself as one of the world’s leading promoters of scepticism about man-made climate change. Heartland has long enjoyed close ties to Republican networks and figures associated with Donald Trump.
Last year, Farage addressed a Heartland fundraiser in Chicago, encouraging the organisation to expand “across the Pond.”
Meanwhile, Reform allies have helped launch Heartland-linked initiatives in Europe alongside far-right activists and Trump supporters. According to DeSmog, Reform has also received millions in donations connected to fossil fuel interests.
The result is that Britain’s climate politics increasingly resemble the United States. Net zero is no longer discussed primarily in terms of energy security, industrial investment or scientific necessity, but as a symbolic battleground in a wider war against “elites,” regulation and liberal institutions.
And it’s dragged the Conservatives with it, where there is little daylight between Tory and Reform on climate policy, including repealing the Climate Change Act 2008.
The cost of climate scepticism
The irony is that Britain was once seen as a world leader on climate policy. Both Conservative and Labour governments understood that cutting emissions was not just about protecting the environment, but about energy security, economic stability and preparing for the future.
Now, that political consensus is starting to fall apart under the pressure of culture-war politics, fossil fuel lobbying, tabloid outrage and the growing influence of American-style populism.
Climate change doesn’t care whether newspapers describe heatwaves as “glorious,” whether columnists mock net zero, or whether politicians decide green policies are unpopular. The consequences continue regardless, hotter summers, wetter winters, rising food prices, overstretched infrastructure, and increasing pressure on water and energy supplies.
Most worrying of all is that such scepticism is no longer limited to the populist fringe. Just this week, Tony Blair urged Labour to scale back climate ambitions and move closer to Donald Trump, confirming the scale of how American-style climate politics has entered Britain.
More worrying still, Tony Blair’s comments this week, delivered in a highly critical essay on the current Labour government, have been criticised for parroting Donald Trump’s billionaire backers. Critics have pointed in particular to Larry Ellison, the Oracle billionaire and prominent Trump supporter, who has reportedly funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars into the Tony Blair Institute.
What began as Murdoch-driven tabloid scepticism is fast becoming mainstream political thinking, at precisely the moment serious climate action is most urgently needed, as Britain swelters in temperatures hotter than Hawaii and Athens.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
Mental Health Awareness Week starts on Monday, a time we should be surely reflecting on real progress, like reduced stigma, greater openness and a deeper understanding of mental wellbeing. Instead, it arrives amid a growing political effort to recast that progress as a societal menace.
Let’s be clear, the claim that Britain is “overdiagnosing” mental illness is not a serious diagnosis of a social issue. It’s a political strategy. It reframes vulnerability as weakness, support as excess, and turns one of the country’s most pressing public health challenges into a convenient scapegoat for a much older and familiar objective – shrinking the welfare state.
What’s being constructed is not a policy debate, but a culture war front. Pitting the “deserving” against the “undeserving,” with mental health as the battleground.
The real target: welfare spending
And the usual suspects are piling it on.
Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice has likened mental health to the “modern-day equivalent of back pain,” suggesting people are “swinging the lead.” Nigel Farage has warned of “massive overdiagnosis” creating a “class of victims.” Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has argued young people are being overdiagnosed with mental health conditions, while Kemi Badenoch has said we are living in an “age of diagnosis” that is economically unsustainable.
This language does more than question policies and trends, it invites suspicion, not just of those seeking help, but of doctors and the system itself. It implies diagnoses are handed out too easily, that hardship is exaggerated, and that support is being gamed.
Sadly, once that premise takes hold, the policy direction inevitably follows.
The Labour government is tightening eligibility for health-related benefits, aiming to reduce Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit, as part of efforts to curb a rising disability benefit bill, with a particular focus on narrowing access for those with mental health conditions like anxiety or depression.
Yet research into similar Conservative-era reforms warns such cuts are likely to have “devastating” consequences for disabled people’s mental health, while pushing many into poverty.
A study by public health experts at the University of Liverpool examined the impact of cuts to out-of-work disability benefits introduced by the Conservative government in April 2017. It found that the cuts, pushed through parliament by Tory work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith as part of his Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, had a “serious” impact on disabled people who left work in that period. The changes were associated with an additional 92,000 people with long-term conditions each year reporting “common mental disorders” such as depression and anxiety. The £30-a-week reduction for those in the work-related activity group (WRAG) of the Employment and Support Allowance, was linked to a “serious” deterioration in mental health among affected claimants.
The research also warned that such cuts can impose significant downstream costs on public services, including the NHS, social care and local authorities.
Framing mental health as overdiagnosis provides political cover for these measures, and it’s a framing that’s depressingly familiar on the pages of the right-wing press. Just this week, the Telegraph’s front page proclaimed ‘welfare pays more than work for 600,000 households,’ linking benefit spending to pressures on Britain’s defence budget.
Such headlines construct a narrative of excess, even when the underlying data is far more complex.
The reality: a system under strain
This narrative also bears little resemblance to the state of mental health services.
Data from Rethink Mental Illness shows that patients routinely face far longer waits for mental health treatment than for physical conditions, with many waiting over 18 months. That is not evidence of overdiagnosis, it’s evidence of under-capacity.
Research from Mind, YoungMinds and the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition paints a similar picture: that young people feel underserved, not overindulged; that parents are concerned about access, not excess; and that there is widespread belief that policymakers are failing to respond adequately. The idea of a system awash with unnecessary diagnoses collapses when confronted with the reality of long delays and unmet need.
What’s actually driving the crisis
Rising levels of mental ill health, especially among younger people, are well documented, but they are not the product of a cultural fad, driven by TikTok content that frames traits like talkativeness or difficulty finishing projects as evidence of ADHD, as the right-wing culture warriors would have us believe.
Evidence points instead to a convergence of structural pressures. The charity Mind notes how a significant proportion of mental health problems are linked to early-life adversity, including poverty, trauma, and social isolation.
Economic instability has also become a defining feature of today’s youth, with the cost-of-living crisis cited by many as a direct contributor to declining mental wellbeing.
The Health Foundation highlights how economic policy can shape feelings of insecurity and hopelessness, while research from King’s College London points to the additional influence of social media and technological change.
These are complex, overlapping drivers. Reducing them to “overdiagnosis” is not simplification, it’s distortion.
Another factor often misrepresented is the rise in mental health awareness itself.
Campaigns such as Mental Health Awareness Week, led by the Mental Health Foundation, which was founded in 1949, exist because stigma and silence once dominated public attitudes. Greater visibility today reflects progress in recognising and addressing mental health, not a sudden surge in fabricated illness.
To characterise this shift as a problem is to imply that previous underreporting was preferable, that fewer diagnoses meant a healthier society. But the evidence does not support that conclusion.
Pushback from the front line
Mental health and disability organisations have hit out at claims of widespread overdiagnosis, pointing to how individuals often face prolonged, difficult processes to secure diagnosis and support.
They warn that dismissive language risks deepening stigma and discouraging people from seeking help, consequences that are particularly dangerous in a system already under strain.
Mel Merritt, head of policy and campaigns at the National Autistic Society, condemned Farage’s comments as “wildly inaccurate” and that they show how “completely out of touch with what autistic children and adults have to go through to get a diagnosis or any support at all.”
“Children with Send and disabled adults, including autistic people, are not victims who are being ‘overdiagnosed’” he said.
“They are people who face huge delays and long fights to get the most basic support across every aspect of their lives, including diagnosis, education, health and social care.
“Spreading misinformation only perpetuates stigma and makes life harder. We’re calling on all politicians to drop the political point-scoring and stand up for their autistic and other disabled constituents.”
A familiar playbook
And this strategy has precedents. In Hungary, former far-right leader Viktor Orbán pursued welfare retrenchment under the banner of promoting work.
In 2012, he announced Hungary would move away from a “Western-type” welfare state, arguing it was not competitive. The goal was to force the unemployed into public work programmes. The government cut maximum unemployment benefits to three months and slashed average benefit payments to roughly 25% below the minimum wage.
While employment figures improved on paper, the model coincided with rising inequality and broader economic strain. It ultimately faltered amid stagnation, inflation and growing public dissatisfaction, culminating in the election victory of Péter Magyar’s Tisza party.
Farage has peddled similar themes, recently arguing Britain’s main divide is between “those that work and those that don’t,” even suggesting he would pursue benefit cuts despite the risk of riots.
It’s a familiar line within the populist radical right, and one that history suggests carries significant social costs.
As Annamária Artner, senior research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of World Economics, wrote in Social Europe in 2016: “Hungary represents an extreme outlier in its zealous adoption of workfare, questioning the fundamental values of solidarity which should underpin a social Europe.”
By casting society as “those who work” versus “those who don’t,” figures like Farage reduce complex realities to moral categories. Mental health becomes a marker within that divide, recast as evidence of dependency rather than a legitimate condition.
As Mental Health Awareness Week approaches, the contrast is depressing. On one hand, there’s been decades of effort to reduce stigma and expand support; on the other, there’s a growing weaponisation of mental health within a broader ideological battle.
The evidence points to a system under strain, shaped by economic pressure and unmet need. The culture war narrative, by contrast, points elsewhere, towards individual blame and systemic retrenchment.
The danger is not only that this narrative is wrong. It is that, if acted upon, it risks deepening the very crisis it claims to explain.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
Last fall, we featured an extensive interview with Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that give rise to its worst aspects: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive voices. He wasn't optimistic about social media's future.
Törnberg's research showed that, while numerous platform-level intervention strategies have been proposed to combat these issues, none are likely to be effective. And it’s not the fault of much-hated algorithms, non-chronological feeds, or our human proclivity for seeking out negativity. Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media. So we’re probably doomed to endless toxic feedback loops unless someone hits upon a brilliant fundamental redesign that manages to change those dynamics.
Törnberg has been very busy since then, producing two new papers and one new preprint building on this realization that social media is structured quite differently than the physical world, with unexpected downstream consequences. The first new paper, published in PLoS ONE, specifically focused on the echo chamber effect, using the same combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs)—essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior.
Opinion polls can be a valuable tool for understanding public sentiment. When conducted properly, through neutral wording, representative samples and transparent methodology, they help capture the complexities of public opinion. But the ‘polls’ that regularly appear on the pages of the right-wing press often bear little resemblance to genuine research.
Instead, they frequently rely on loaded questions, selective statistics and audiences already primed to agree with the publication’s editorial position. The result is less a measure of public opinion than a feedback loop in which readers are invited to confirm the narrative they have just been presented with.
Here are four recent examples that illustrate how such polls can be used to manufacture outrage rather than measure opinion.
The article introducing the poll highlighted figures showing that more than 179,000 non-EU migrants with indefinite leave to remain had claimed Universal Credit in 2024. It also quoted criticism from Conservative politicians.
What the framing omitted was key context that people granted indefinite leave to remain have usually lived and worked in the UK for years and have the same entitlement to claim benefits as others if they meet the criteria. By presenting the figures without that context, and immediately pairing them with political outrage, the poll nudges readers toward a particular answer.
Another example came from GB News, which asked readers whether Winston Churchill should be removed from British banknotes.
The poll followed confirmation from the Bank of England that future banknote designs will focus on themes such as wildlife rather than historical figures.
The article framed the change as an attack on a national icon, prompting readers to respond defensively. Unsurprisingly, many comments echoed that sentiment, praising Churchill as a symbol of Britain’s wartime “Bulldog spirit.”
The Daily Mail ran a “Morning Poll” asking whether Meghan, Duchess of Sussex had “turned into Sarah Ferguson” after taking part in a paid meet-and-greet event.
The question itself carries the judgement, essentially assuming readers will view Meghan, whom the right have long loved to hate, negatively.
GB News also asked readers whether trust in the BBC is at a “crisis point.”
The wording already implies the conclusion. Rather than asking neutrally about levels of trust, the poll presents “crisis” as the premise and invites readers to confirm it, an example of a classic leading question.
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Some rare good news emerged this week. Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal backed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party to reduce the licence fee that funds the country’s public broadcaster, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC).
The result represents a clear public endorsement of public service broadcasting. It also acts as a message for far-right movements across Europe, which are increasingly targeting national broadcasters.
In many countries these institutions are accused of political bias or of operating with outdated funding models. Yet the real political objective behind many of these campaigns is less about reform and more about weakening independent media institutions.
BBC in the firing line
Nowhere is this debate more intense than in the UK. For years, right-wing politicians, commentators and think tanks have argued that the BBC’s mandatory licence-fee funding model is outdated and unfair. Their criticism frequently centres on alleged political bias, despite the BBC’s longstanding global reputation as one of the most respected public broadcasters in the world.
The BBC is not immune from criticism, of course. No large media institution is. It has long been accused of both left and right-wing bias. Critics on the right point to what they see as liberal, metropolitan values, while critics on the left argue it too often privileges government narratives and establishment voices. Reuters Institute research shows that, overall, the BBC is less trusted by the political right than people on the left.
But the current wave of attacks is part of a broader political strategy aimed at delegitimising public-service media altogether.
Even figures outside the UK have joined the anti-BBC chorus. In November, Donald Trump claimed he had an “obligation” to sue the BBC over the editing of a section of his speech in an episode of Panorama.
The deeper danger is not criticism itself, but what comes next. Across Europe, far-right parties seek not merely to weaken public broadcasters financially but to reshape them politically, either by forcing them into commercial dependence or by bringing them under direct political influence if they gain power.
A playbook spreading across Europe
If such forces were ever able to exert real control over the BBC, the consequences would be profound. The occasional grumble about paying the licence fee would quickly seem trivial compared with the prospect of political interference in one of the world’s most prestigious media institutions.
Just imagine if Nigel Farage or his allies held meaningful influence over the BBC. A broadcaster historically associated with rigorous editorial standards could be transformed into something closer to a partisan outlet, something resembling GB News, but with vastly greater reach and influence.
And Farage’s ideological allies across Europe are pursuing similar strategies, seeking to undermine the independence of public broadcasters in their own countries.
In France, the far-right National Rally has threatened to privatise the country’s public television and radio networks. Ahead of the snap general election in 2024, the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, said his ambition was to privatise public broadcasters “in order to make savings,” adding that they would operate under a set of specifications.
The party’s vice president Sebastien Chénu said that public television and radio needed “a bit of liberty, some oxygen,” while criticising radio programmes he claimed, “lean to the left or far left.”
Similar pressures are emerging elsewhere in Europe. Speaking to the Spanish newspaper El Pais earlier this year, Luis Menéndez, head of the development committee of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), warned that threats to public service media are gaining ground in Poland, Slovakia, Malta and Hungary.
“It’s a wind that brings not only cold, but also waves of disinformation, sinister gusts of espionage, bursts of hybrid-digital warfare, and gales against free journalism and democracy,” Menéndez said, warning that such conditions create fertile ground for far-right political conspiracy theories that target public media.
Hungary’s warning
Hungary offers perhaps has the most depressing and worrying example of how political power can reshape a country’s media landscape. For more than a decade, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has presided over the expansion of a vast pro-government media ecosystem that dominates much of the national conversation.
Péter Magyar, leader of Respect and Freedom (TISZA) party, has described what he sees as the corrosive effects of what he calls Orbán’s “propaganda factory.”
“It might be very difficult to imagine from America or Western Europe what the propaganda and the state machinery is like here,” Magyar said in an interview with the Associated Press. “This parallel reality is like the Truman Show. People believe that it’s reality.”
America’s parallel crisis
Yet such pressures facing independent media are not confined to Central and Eastern Europe, or indeed the wider continent.
The dynamics echo developments in the United States. Budget cuts under Donald Trump have already led to the closure of the US Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the body created in 1967 to support the country’s public radio and television system. After nearly six decades in operation, the non-profit announced earlier this year that it would dissolve following severe federal funding reductions.
Trump and his MAGA allies have long targeted NPR (National Public Radio) and PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), the two main networks supported by the CPB. Plans to eliminate their funding were outlined in the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump administration, Project 2025.
The policy memo said: “For years taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidising [NPR and PBS], which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’.”
Last July, Trump wrote on social media that any Republican who voted against funding cuts “to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or endorsement.”
Announcing the organisation’s dissolution, CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said its “final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organisation to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attack.”
The growing power of media billionaires
The drawing of public broadcasters into wider political battles over information, influence and democratic accountability, comes at a time when ownership of the US media landscape is already highly concentrated in the hands of a small number of billionaires.
The world’s richest man owns X, the family of the second-richest controls Paramount, which owns CBS, the third richest owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the fourth richest owns the Washington Post and Amazon MGM Studios, and another billionaire controls Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
Many of these powerful media barons have, to varying degrees, accommodated the demands of a combative president who has simultaneously stripped public broadcasting of federal support.
As the magazine Prospectobserved in a recent paper on the state of US media: “Increasingly, Americans say they no longer know who or what to believe.”
Why the Swiss vote matters
The picture is uncomfortably familiar in the UK. Here, too, a small group of wealthy owners dominates much of the national newspaper industry. The BBC remains a frequent target of political attack from the right, even as openly partisan broadcasters and new populist news websites enter the market.
Meanwhile Nigel Farage, whose far-right party is gaining ground electorally, has repeatedly pledged to abolish the licence fee and replace it with a subscription model, arguing that the broadcaster is “institutionally biased.”
It’s not difficult to see how fragile and susceptible to manipulation the information environment can become, even in countries that still like to think of themselves as stable western democracies.
Viewers may often be frustrated with aspects of the BBC’s coverage, such as disproportionate attention given to figures like Farage. But abolishing the licence fee could concentrate even greater power in the hands of wealthy private media owners, many of them based outside the UK.
Weakening public broadcasting would also accelerate a shift toward subscription-based media, forcing households to rely on multiple private platforms simply to access news and live television. By contrast, the current licence fee, around £180 a year, funds a wide range of news, cultural programming and entertainment that remains universally available.
Against that backdrop, the Swiss vote takes on wider significance. By rejecting an attempt to weaken the country’s public broadcaster, voters signalled that, when given the choice, citizens may still recognise the value of independent public-service media, and may be willing to defend it.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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Transphobia fuelled by the media, has helped create a “hostile environment” for trans people in the UK, according to a new report by TransActual, a national advocacy and education organisation that works with trans adults.
The report concludes that transgender people across the country are facing rising levels of prejudice and discrimination, with detrimental consequences on their wellbeing and everyday lives.
Based on responses from around 4,000 trans people aged between 18 and 81, the study describes the situation as a “crisis” in which trans people are “being catastrophically failed.”
Researchers found that discrimination directed at transgender people is producing what they describe as a “hostile environment,” negatively affecting mental health and creating barriers to accessing healthcare. Almost every respondent reported that negative or hostile media coverage had either intensified their gender dysphoria or worsened their mental health. In addition, 99 percent said they had witnessed politicians expressing transphobic views.
The survey also suggests that media narratives are shaping how trans people are treated in everyday life. Large majorities of respondents believed negative coverage had influenced the behaviour of strangers (96 percent), family members (91 percent), colleagues (85 percent), and friends (74 percent). Many said this had left them feeling less safe in public spaces, exposed to greater prejudice in workplaces and social settings, and lacking support at home.
Among respondents who had experienced transphobia from family members in the past year, 98 percent believed that media narratives had influenced how their relatives treated them.
The report also highlights broader social and economic challenges. Nearly two-thirds of respondents reported household incomes below £30,000 a year, around a quarter said they had experienced homelessness, and 64 percent said they would avoid contacting their GP even if they had a health issue.
“Decisions about trans people’s lives are increasingly based entirely on the testimony of non-trans people,” said the report’s co-authors, Freddy Sperring and Dr Trent Grassian.
“Trans people are enduring unliveable conditions in what amounts to a domestic human rights crisis. The UK government has an urgent responsibility to recommit itself to defending trans people’s human rights.”
Some media outlets have been repeatedly criticised by campaigners for coverage they consider hostile toward transgender people. The Daily Mail, for instance, has faced frequent accusations of publishing articles framed in ways critics say reinforce negative narratives about trans communities.
One Reddit user commenting on the paper wrote:
“Like most individuals here, I detest the rabble-rousing ‘journalism’ of the Daily Mail. They slander and vilify us, speaking in favour of measures which would curtail our rights. I am fed up of waking up every morning and seeing a Daily Mail article which inevitably tries to sensationalise some non-issue related to us transgender folk.”
The research was conducted ahead of the landmark ruling by the Supreme Court of in April last year, which determined that the terms “sex” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 should be interpreted as referring to biological sex.
Responding to the judgment at the time, Amnesty International UK described the decision as “disappointing” and warned it could have “potentially concerning consequences for trans people.”
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We are excited to announce the release of WP Offload Media 3.3! This release focuses on modernizing our codebase to support the latest server environments, expanding our global footprint with new storage regions, and refining the user experience with key stability improvements.
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💾 Improved Metadata Integrity
For those who frequently move media between the cloud and their local server, we’ve made an important improvement to data preservation. Previously, when an item was downloaded from the cloud back to the server, the file size attachment metadata value could be removed.
In version 3.3, this value is no longer removed during the download process, ensuring your attachment metadata remains complete and accurate regardless of where the file currently lives.
🛠️ Integrations and UI Fixes
We are always working to ensure WP Offload Media plays nicely with the rest of the WordPress ecosystem. This release fixes a specific conflict with Rank Math SEO, where deleting an item via the Media Library’s grid mode would fail. This functionality has been restored.
We also polished the user interface on the “Edit Media” page. Now, when you toggle the Public/Private access status of a file, the “Download File” link updates dynamically to reflect the change immediately, without requiring a page refresh.
🤩 And More…
Robustness: We’ve added protection against invalid values being passed to the core the_post action, preventing potential crashes.
Legacy Support: The legacy file size upgrade routine has been patched so it no longer throws errors if attachment metadata is missing.
For a full breakdown of changes, you can view the changelog.
Are you ready to update? As always, we recommend backing up your site before performing any major updates. Let us know what you think of the new changes in the comments below!
If you haven’t heard of this service, Buy Me a Coffee is an easy way for folks to contribute to the efforts of their favorite creators. I signed up years ago and, over the years have gotten a reasonable number of contributions. Occasionally, I’d go to my account and sweep the balance into my savings account. Easy peasy.
Then, for reasons I don’t understand, Buy Me a Coffee got a third party credit card company involved, Stripe. I had to jump through hoops to set up a Stripe account and provide a lot more personal information than I wanted to in order to get my money. (I don’t see why they need a photo of my driver’s license to give me $46.) So I decided to stop using them and, instead, set up a Buy Me a Coffee item on my Square account. This way when folks make a contribution, Square takes its fee and just puts the rest in my bank account. Very easy and no need for a third party intervention.
Unfortunately, a bunch of those old Buy Me a Coffee links were still out there and that’s what my latest contributor used. So I spent this morning squashing every link in my blogs. I still need to go through all of my YouTube video descriptions. I’ll wait until I know I’ve squashed all the links before doing a final sweep and closing my Buy Me a Coffee account.
It never ceases to amaze me how many organizations need to get a piece of the action every time a creator is receives money for work.
This morning, I got a notification that a YouTube channel subscriber had contributed $25 to my publishing efforts via Buy Me a Coffee. His accompanying message to me told me a bunch of things that he liked and wanted to see.
I Need Motivation
Getting positive feedback — yes, with money, although that didn’t really matter as much — reminded me that I usually don’t just sit on my ass and watch the clock hands spin my life away. I’m usually working on creative projects like my blog or YouTube channel content or the book I started writing about my Great Loop adventure. Or making jewelry in my studio (or mobile studio).
But lately I’ve been feeling kind of meh — I think world events and the fall of the United States’ democracy have something to do with that but won’t discuss it here — and have been spending entirely too much time on social media (Mastodon), doing word and number puzzles (even I think 8 sudokus a day is extreme), and watching YouTube videos. It was only over the past two days that I decided to practice using my drone and exploring livestreaming from it that I’ve been making better use of my time.
And that’s what prompted my latest supporter, who watched the livestream, to contribute and speak up. So that’s all good.
It also got me motivated to check out new comments on my personal YouTube channel and respond to them. And to write a post letting subscribers know I was still alive and what my plans were for the next few months. Here’s that post.
The Post
I just caught up with a bunch of comments on this channel and thought it was time for an update.
It’s winter and I’ve left my home in the very capable hands of my regular winter housesitter so I can return to Arizona, California, and sunny warm weather. I’m in my RV pulling a small utility trailer that contains my jewelry studio and the equipment I need to appear at art shows. I’ve done two art shows in Arizona; one was a bomb and the other was good (but not great). Right now I’m boondocking in my rig on BLM land between Buckeye and Gila Bend, AZ. From here I’ll go to Quartzite, the Holtville Hot Springs, Death Valley, and then, depending on the weather, home.
Golden hour drone photo of my campsite on BLM land between Gila Bend and Buckeye.
I’ll spend today working on a blog post (and maybe video) about my boondocking setup and philosophy, which is remarkably similar to my boat anchoring out setup and philosophy. With luck, I’ll finish and publish later today or tomorrow morning. I’d like to mention here that the topic was requested by a channel subscriber who watched my drone livestream yesterday and was kind enough to donate to the channel using the Buy Me a Coffee links on some videos and blog posts.
Meanwhile, my boat is languishing on its trailer in my garage. I’ll get it in the water in Bellingham WA in April, have all its scheduled maintenance done before month-end, and then take it on a two-week shakedown cruise in the San Juan Islands and Inside Passage. I’ve already got one training client booked to spend three days on board with me. After that cruise, it gets a final preparation for the charter season and will then be available for charter through San Juan Yachting. It’s already booked for several weeks. I’ve scheduled a total of five weeks for myself during the season, including two weeks in September so I can attend the Ranger Rendezvous at Roche Harbor. I’ll be doing training on my boat during my charter time and already have a client scheduled for two days in July. I’m also planning on making a lot of boating videos over the summer and am open to your suggestions on topics to cover.
So yeah: I’m keeping busy and have plans for the future.
I also want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that this channel is 100% human created. I don’t use AI for anything. I urge you to support human creators on YouTube. We work hard for very little recognition. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see AI slop getting thousands of views and drowning out our voices.
If you have any questions or comments regarding this channel and the directions I plan to take it, please let me know. I’m always interested in feedback.
So Now, Back to Work
I’ve pulled out my daily planner and jotted down the things I want to accomplish today. That’ll help keep me focused. It’s a dreary day for the Arizona desert, with high clouds filtering the normally strong sunlight. I don’t think it’ll get very warm. In fact, I just put on a flannel shirt and made myself a hot cocoa to help warm up. Perfect day to stay indoors and write.
Do you miss the ads?
Isn’t it nice to visit a website that isn’t plastered with advertising or sponsor messages? If you appreciate the (mostly) ad-free experience, how about buying me a cup of coffee to thank me?
So I’ll write a post about my boondocking and anchoring setups and include some photos to illustrated what I’m talking about. And maybe I’ll even get motivated enough to capture some video or assemble some photographs to turn them into a vlog post for YouTube. Meanwhile, I’ll stay off social media and avoid distractions. I’ll get something worthwhile done.
Your comments are always appreciated. Use the form for this post. I usually respond within 24 hours.
An update to my October 13, 2025 blog post about the Claude AI system summarizing the transcript of a video I really liked.
I’ve been thinking about the 30 Habits video I shared earlier this month a lot. Maybe too much.
First of all, I really do like the 30 “habits” listed in the video. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. I really think they are good things to make part of your life. (If you haven’t watched the video and are looking for little things to make your life better, please take less than 20 minutes of your day and watch it.)
I decided that in order to make them part of my life I needed to be reminded of them. The idea was to make myself a little cheat sheet that I could put in my daily planner and look at once in a while. No one can expect me (or anyone else) to remember all 30 things on the list.
So I went back to the Claude summary and used it as the basis for my cheat sheet. The initial design would be bullet points. But I quickly realized that for some of the items, a bullet point would not be enough. For example, what does “small trust deposits” mean? Clearly, I needed more info on my cheat sheet.
The laminated insert fits into my Traveler’s Notebook in the middle of the bullet journal I use for miscellaneous notes.
I changed the design to a folding insert with the bullet list on the cover and the details inside and finishing up on the back. And rather than rewrite the summary myself, I just copied and pasted the Claude AI summary. I edited it a bit for length and clarity — honestly, it didn’t need much in the way of changes — and applied a font size that would make it fit while retaining legibility. After a little formatting, it was finished. I printed it, laminated it, and inserted it into my Traveler’s Notebook style planner. (The planner, by the way, has gotten yet another upgrade since Part 3 of that series and I may blog about it briefly.)
This is exactly what I needed to keep these 30 Habits front and center — or at least within arm’s reach — in my life.
This has changed my view of AI — at least a little. Clearly MDY’s use of Claude has a lot of merit — maybe even more than I originally admitted. (I have since messaged her on Mastodon and told her this.) While she used it to summarize the video’s transcript and used the summary as a decision-making tool for watching it, I can see it as a way to summarize something I’ve already watched that means a lot to me. Yes, I’m talking about letting it take notes for me.
I’m wondering if it always does such a good job or if this was a fluke. I’m also wondering whether Claude is better at it than its competitors.
But I’m not wondering enough to actually try it for myself. At least not yet. I don’t want to support AI and I believe that using it is supporting it. I really do want to think for myself, to keep my own summarization skills. And I sincerely hope that folks who have not built those skills yet try to do so without leaning on AI.
You also have to jump through hoops to sell it and account for it.
When was the last time you bought something from the person who made it? A piece of pottery, a wooden jewelry box, a framed painting, a hand-bound notebook, a leather wallet, a pair of earrings?
Do you have any idea what went into that item, from the moment it was imagined by the artist to the moment you took possession of it?
My friend Janet LeRoy has been painting mostly wildlife on turkey feathers for longer than the 30 years I’ve known her. When people ask her how long it takes to do a photo, she tells them 40 years — that’s the amount of time it has taken her to hone her craft to where she is today.
Let’s look at the skills required, which is probably the least considered piece of this puzzle. Babies don’t emerge from the womb knowing how to make things. Their ability to creatively design and then construct a piece of art is something learned over years. Sure, some of it might be natural — lots of people (but not me) seem to have an eye for drawing or making music. But most folks, no matter what their natural skills seem to be, need training and practice to hone those skills. A kid has to come a long way from drawing with crayons in kindergarten to painting fine art images with acrylics on turkey feathers.
The next time you browse an art show, take a moment to consider the kinds of skills the artist needed to hone to make what you see in her booth. Think about how she got them. Maybe it’s self-taught with years and years of practice. Or maybe she took often expensive hands-on classes. (I did a bit of both.)
Now consider the often specialized tools and equipment. I bet you can’t even imagine half the tools a potter or a woodworker or a jewelry artist uses to make their artwork. Next time you’re at an art show, if an artist you admire isn’t too busy, take a moment to learn more about the tools and equipment they use in their studio.
Two color-matched Pietersite stones double bezel set in sterling silver. I made everything in this photo except the stones. (I’d rather make jewelry than polish stones.) You can find my work in my online shop.
Here’s a photo of a pendant I finished yesterday, and here’s a run-down of the tools and equipment I used to make it:
Jeweler’s bench (homemade)
Adjustable jeweler’s stool
Cutting mat
Metal shear (tabletop)
Metal sheer (handtool)
Steel hammer
Weighted nylon-head mallet
STERLING stamp
Custom Makers mark stamp
Flush cutters
Flex shaft (basically a foot-controlled Dremel)
Sanding wheel
Bail template
Bail-making plyers
Chain nose pliers
Smith Little Torch setup
Propane Tank
Oxygen Tank
Quenching bowl
Pickle pot
Neutralizing solution
Silver patina
Tumbler with ceramic media
Tumbler with steel shot
Strainers (two meshes)
Bezel setter
All together, this is about $2,000 worth of equipment. And it doesn’t include the the thousands of dollars of other equipment I use in other work. Not only did I have to acquire all of these tools, but I had to learn how to use them properly. (I’m still working on the Smith Little Torch.)
Rio Grande, my jewelry supply provider, keeps up-to-date pricing information for all precious metals right on its website.
And then there are the materials. I had sticker shock this morning when I checked the price of sterling silver; it’s up more than 100% in two years. Thank heaven I stocked up earlier this year and have enough to take me through the winter. I’ll need to have a few good shows before I stock up again. I’m fortunate that I now have enough cabochons in my collection to last the rest of my life. (Buying stones is a bit of an addiction for me.)
Now I’m getting into monetary costs and I really didn’t mean to go there. So let’s take a turn back to what prompted me to write this post: updating my jewelry business online shop.
The point is, it’s not enough to be creative and have the skills and tools and materials to turn ideas into a piece of art. Today’s artists need to be able to sell that art to keep making it. And that means they’re usually in charge of marketing and sales — after all, how many artists can afford to hire someone to handle that for them?
Marketing, to me, means mentioning my work on social media, trying (and mostly failing) to keep a website up-to-date, photographing all my new work. I’m lucky (or stupid) because I’m only on one social media platform — Mastodon — so I’m not dealing with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik Tok. (I occasionally put videos on YouTube, but since losing my login information for my jewelry account, that’s been a bit difficult.) I simply can’t see spending hours of every day promoting my work on social media when I should be making the work I have to promote.
Sales means applying to and then attending often costly art shows with setup and teardown that suck the physical life out of me. Even just sitting in my booth all day, eating snacks out of a little cooler and having to rely on other artists to keep an eye on things when I run to the restroom to take a leak can be exhausting. Heck, when I do the Leavenworth WA show some weekends, my day is 11 to 14 hours (long door to door), depending on whether it’s a setup day. The show I’m attending in Seattle soon is costing me more than $800 for a 10 x 6 foot space; do you know how much jewelry I have to sell to cover that? (At least it’s indoors.)
Sales also means updating an online shop. I know a lot of folks use Etsy and depend on it for sales. I don’t. I’m tired of them taking such a large chunk of my revenue and displaying my work among so much cheap crap. I’m tired of having to maintain two inventory systems that I have to manually sync up when I make or sell something. I’m tired of giving money to an organization that misleads buyers and sellers. And when you shop there, have you ever stopped to consider how much sellers have to jack up their prices to make a profit after Etsy takes its fees?
So I have my own Square-based shop. It’s free to set up and use; the only fee is the standard credit card fee I pay when a sale is made. But it still takes time to update the site with photos and descriptions when I make new items or sell items outside the square system.
Did I mention that I have to be a photographer, too? Yep. I have to take decent photos of all of my work. I do the best I can, but I’m not pretending it’s good. It’s passable. (Yesterday I considered hiring someone to do it. But I quickly realized I didn’t have the budget to pay someone else to do it.)
And did I mention that I also have to account for all my sales? And file sales tax returns for every state I sell in? So yes, I have to be an accountant, too. (Good thing I got that accounting degree back in the 1980s.)
So I guess that what I’m trying to say is that unless an artist is independently wealthy and can make art for fun, there’s a lot more to making art than just making art.
Think about that the next time you see original artwork available for sale.
I’m impressed by a 15-minute you tube video and surprised by how the Claude AI/LLM summarized it.
I’ll try to keep this short. Let’s see how I do.
As some people know, I often watch boring YouTube videos on my iPad in the middle of the night to help me sleep. The other morning — probably too late to get back to sleep anyway — this one was suggested to me. I tapped it and was soon pulled in by the concise way the creator presented 30 excellent tips in about 15 minutes.
If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare and think your life could use some improvement, I highly recommend watching this. (If you don’t think your life can use some improvement, you’re only fooling yourself; we can all improve.)
I shared the video on Mastodon, as I often do when I see something I believe is really worth watching.
Now if you were expecting some talking head with a big microphone in front of his face and lots of letters after his/her name to read off a teleprompter while mostly unrelated stock footage appears randomly in the background, you will be disappointed. Or, in my case, pleased — I hate those kinds of videos.
This video has some simple graphics to look at while listening, but it doesn’t need to be seen. You can just listen. Or you can do what my Mastodon friend MDY did: feed the transcript to Claude AI and let it summarize it. She shared the link on Mastodon, too: https://claude.ai/public/ artifacts/d5ad56a1-46fe-47ab-9fc7-5f3958dd1b08.
I clicked the link and was immediately impressed (and a little surprised) by the well-organized summary that appeared. I was impressed because, on first glance (and subsequent analysis), it appears to be both accurate and correct — something I’m not accustomed to seeing with AI results. That’s why I was surprised.
Now I’m no fan of AI systems. Not only are they failing miserably most times they’re used to take a human out of a process, but they have huge environmental impacts, sucking power and water that is already costly to produce or downright stupid to waste. I have read more than my fair share of AI horror stories, from lawyers idiotically trusting them to write briefs (that clients are paying hundreds of dollars per hour for a legal processional to write) to programmers spending more time fixing AI-generated code than writing it from scratch.
But at the very top of my list of reasons to hate AI systems is the simple fact that they are being developed and promoted as a way to cut labor costs — yes, the primary purpose is to add to worldwide unemployment.
MDY explained how and why she uses AI to summarize content.
During our subsequent discussion on Mastodon, MDY made a good argument for using an AI like Claude to summarize video. She uses it to summarize content in seconds and then uses that summary to decide whether it’s worth watching the video (or one can assume, reading the article). I have to agree that if the content is long and the summary is concise, AI can save someone a lot of time, enabling them to focus on details in the content they find most valuable.
I do wonder how much time was saved in this example, though; the summary was more than 1600 words.
I also worry about people leaning on AI for tasks like this and losing the ability to create summaries for themselves. I compared an AI summary to the book reports we were required to write in school. What happens if we all just use AI for tasks like this and are then put into a position where we have to do it for ourselves?
I compare the potential loss of this skill to my own loss of spelling capabilities. I used to be a good speller. Really! But that skill is slipping away. I find myself more and more dependent on my computer or mobile device to flag or correct spelling on the fly. Sometimes, rather than look up or make an educated guess at the spelling of a word, I’ll type in something close and let my computer tell me the word I want. I’m not happy about this, but not motivated to turn off spelling check and tackle spelling on my own.
(For the record, I don’t and won’t use a grammar checker. For Pete’s sake, I am a writer. If I can’t get grammar and related style issues correct, I shouldn’t be writing at all.)
And has anyone ever considered the motivations of AI developers to get us addicted to using their systems for things we should be able to do on our own? Do you think the free systems will be free forever?
I guess my thoughts can be summarized as follows:
This video (and yes, the AI summary) is chock full of useful tips that can make your life better. Seriously, if you haven’t watched it yet or read the summary, why the hell not?
Yes, there are things an AI can do for you to make your life easier. But I still don’t think that includes creating original content that requires thought and creativity.
AI should not be replacing people in jobs. Related: A person’s job should not be to check and correct “original” content created by AI.
I don’t know about you, but I like to think for myself. While I can see the utility of the Claude summary MDY shared, I won’t be playing with AIs to summarize content for me any time soon. I’d rather do it the old fashioned way: by paying attention to what’s in front of me and, when appropriate, taking my own notes for future reference.
Algorithms are restricting our online experience by prioritizing engagement over discovery, creating filter bubbles and homogenizing content. To reclaim the web, we must curate our own sources, engage intentionally, and seek out diverse perspectives, breaking free from the passive consumption cycle.
The WordPress media library serves us well for public content, but what about premium assets, private documents, or confidential client data? The default setup makes every uploaded file publicly accessible via a direct URL. This is a critical limitation for membership sites, digital product stores, and businesses sharing sensitive information.
Relying on direct links in your wp-content/uploads folder means anyone who finds the URL can access your content. This is a significant security risk and, for some sites, a potential loss of revenue.
In this article, we address that challenge. We’ll explore a solution to move beyond basic file storage and achieve granular control over your WordPress media, ensuring your valuable or confidential files are securely delivered only to those with proper authorization.
Understanding Public vs. Private Media
To implement a robust system for media delivery, we first need to define the two core types of media access: public and private.
Prepare for the shock of your life: public files are accessible to the public. This is the default for most files you upload to WordPress. Examples include the images embedded in your blog posts, a company logo, or an ungated download, like a template or case study. These files are not sensitive and are intended to be broadly available to anyone and anything that has the direct URL.
A private file, on the other hand, is not directly accessible. If a user attempts to visit its URL directly, they are denied access. This is essential for protecting content that is part of a paid product, membership, or is otherwise restricted. The challenge is that these files still need to be served to the right people. How do we grant access without making the files public?
Implementing Private File Storage
The fundamental principle of private file storage is to separate the file’s physical location from a public-facing URL. Rather than residing in a standard wp-content/uploads directory where all files are inherently public, we move them to a secure, private location. This is where cloud storage solutions come into play.
WP Offload Media acts as a bridge between your WordPress site and this secure cloud storage. Once configured, you can manage a file’s public or private status directly from the WordPress media library. For individual items, you’ll see a dedicated “Offload” meta box that shows the file’s current “Access” status. This status is a toggle link, allowing you to switch a file between “Public” and “Private” in the bucket. The plugin handles the rest, updating the file’s Access Control List (ACL) in the cloud to restrict direct public access.
It’s worth noting an advanced use case for Amazon S3 and CloudFront: if you have “Block All Public Access to bucket” enabled on your S3 bucket, every file is already private by default. In this scenario, WP Offload Media does not need to update the file’s ACL. Instead, all content is delivered through the CloudFront CDN, which relies on signed URLs to manage private access. With this architecture in place, the challenge is no longer about keeping files private, but rather about securely serving them when needed.
Granting Controlled Access with Signed URLs
With our files securely stored in a private cloud bucket, we face the next challenge: how do we grant temporary, controlled access to an authorized user? The direct URL is no longer an option, and routing every download through a slow, resource-intensive server-side script is a performance bottleneck.
The solution is a signed URL. A signed URL is a secure, temporary, and authenticated link that grants a user permission to access a private file for a limited time. It contains a unique signature and an expiration timestamp, making it impossible to share indefinitely.
The process works as follows: when a user requests a private file (for example, by clicking a button to download a premium PDF), WP Offload Media intercepts that request. Instead of serving the file directly, it securely communicates with your cloud storage provider to generate a unique signed URL. This temporary link is then served to the user, allowing them to download or view the file.
The benefits of this approach are substantial. First, it is highly secure, as the link expires after a set period, preventing it from being shared or abused. Second, it is exceptionally performant. The temporary URL serves the file directly from the high-speed content delivery network of your cloud provider, offloading the work from your WordPress server. This process is also seamless to the end user.
This mechanism is ideal for a wide range of applications, from embedding a private video in a members-only area to creating a secure download link for a software purchase or an e-book. It provides a robust and scalable solution for delivering private content without ever exposing the original file’s location.
Wrapping Up
By moving beyond the default WordPress media library, we have established a robust system for securing and delivering your digital assets. We started by identifying the fundamental difference between public and private files, recognizing that not all media is meant for everyone. We then implemented a solution that stores private files securely in cloud storage, completely out of public reach.
The key to granting access to these files lies in the use of signed URLs, which provide a temporary, authenticated, and secure way for authorized users to view or download content without compromising its privacy.
This approach transforms your WordPress site from a simple content platform into a secure delivery mechanism capable of handling sensitive e-books, premium video content, confidential client documents, and more. You are no longer limited by the inherent public nature of the standard media library. Instead, you have a scalable, performant, and highly secure system that ensures your valuable media is always protected and delivered with precision.
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