Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thanks a lot for tuning in.

And we've got a lot to cram in in our time together.

It might be the Easter recess. Some of you might be on a beach somewhere with the sun shining.

Some of you might be cooking for Easter or baking for Easter, but we have got to get together to make sense of things.

If it's okay with all of you, I thought we'd focus on the media.

The BBC have got a new director general to reflect a bit on some of the challenges in that post.

You can probably guess my view of some of those challenges, which I suspect a lot of you will agree with, some won't. So we will be having our never-ending debate on that. And before we got to get to

the BBC, just a couple of other reflections on the wider media. I got an email from the

Labour MP John Slinger about the whole GB News situation, which is incredible.

John Slinger writes, you kindly mentioned on your podcast my views, this was some time ago,

for the left to have our own version of GB News. This is because it's clear that offcom aren't going to

properly regulate this space, and we mustn't get into a situation where in five to ten years

time, we ask ourselves, why didn't we do more to provide an alternative on the left of

centre to these partisan broadcasters? I fear that we on the centre left are far too reliant on the good chap

chappet principle. In this day and age, it just doesn't work. I don't see why we shouldn't have

our own news channel and perhaps call it UK news. It could report on the news and on political

debates and have predominantly left ofof-centre perspectives.

John, I think there is another option, which I'll come to,

but the reason, of course, there isn't that channel,

is they cost a fortune, even channels like GB News,

where there's a kind of presenter and a couple of guests in a studio and a few reporters out and about, it's still very expensive, and G.B. News makes

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