Why are the British press so dreadfully narcissistic?

The press reaction to Sam Coates car crash interview tactics makes them out to be an unbelievably narcissistic bunch of cry-bullies.

Sky’s Sam Coates is very far from the worst journalist in the rancid quagmire that is Britain’s media class, however he did make a complete fool out of himself interviewing George Galloway after his landslide by-election victory in Rochdale.

Coates repeatedly recited Rishi Sunak’s Tory attack lines at George Galloway, uncritically regurgitated unsubstantiated allegations, and came across like a little boy on the verge of a tantrum when Galloway refused to say that he respects Rishi Sunak.

It’s hard to claim you’re not acting as a mouthpiece of the government when the majority of your interview constitutes badgering an opposition MP with 'Rishi says this', 'Rishi says that', and "do you not respect the Prime Minister?" as if the PM job comes with some automatic entitlement to respect, even though Sunak’s clearly got no respect, class, or decency of his own.

Watch the clip and pay attention to the people who gather behind the camera, laugh in the background, visibly agree with Galloway, and applaud some of his points (we’ll come back to them).

Maybe Coates was tired and hadn’t thought his interview approach through very carefully, but the result was that he allowed Galloway to give him an absolute mauling, and made himself look like a lickspittle government mouthpiece in the process.

The clip has gone fairly viral on social media, but it’s the reaction of Coates’ Sky colleagues that’s most fascinating.

Instead of recognising that their pal had had a bad day, they suddenly started crying intimidation, as if the crowd of laughing people who gathered behind the camera were some kind of terrifying threat.

Kate McCann took to Xitter to portray the calmly gathering crowd as "George Galloway’s supporters" and accuse them of getting too "close" to "wave in his face" and "shout over broadcast", before opining that she’s "always found that kind of hostility towards us journalists really uncomfortable".

No criticism of Coates’ unbelievably crass and antagonistic interview tactics, but the laughing and clapping crowd are hostile and scary?

How does that bear any relation to the video we just watched?

Meanwhile Tom Larkin, also of Sky, posted a picture taken while the interview was taking place with the intention of making a politician talking to the press with supporters/members of the public in the background seem as if it’s some kind of extraordinary and unusual event, rather than absolutely normal.

So the framing they’re trying to construct is that their colleague only made a fool of himself like that because he was so intimidated by the crowd that slowly gathered behind the camera, even though they weren’t there when he started with his hostile and absurd line of 'Rishi says …' questioning, and despite the fact that anyone who actually watches the clip can see that none of the crowd are making threats or hostile gestures, they’re merely laughing at the ridiculous questions and agreeing with Galloway’s criticisms of Sunak and Starmer.

I’m not saying any of this to defend Galloway. I’m not a big fan of his, and he’s clearly well capable of defending himself anyway.

I’m saying it to point out what a bunch of cry-bullies the press pack are behaving like.

They can look at their colleague resorting to dirty smear tactics, insinuations, and uncritical repetition of Tory attack lines, and somehow decide that he’s the victim of hostility, and that George Galloway and the laughing members of the public in the background are the aggressors.

What makes this victimhood posturing all the more distasteful is the context.

More journalists have been slaughtered by Israel in Gaza in the space of a few months than all of the journalists killed in six long years of the all-out intercontinental warfare of World War Two!

Perhaps their concerns over journalist safety would be more appropriately aimed at Israel and their obscene tactics of targeting prominent Palestinian journalists with airstrikes to kill not just them, but their entire families too?

And then there’s the disgraceful Julian Assange situation. A journalist languishes in a Belmarsh Prison under threat of imminent deportation to a country that plotted to kidnap and assassinate him, where he faces a ludicrous potential sentence of 175 years in jail for the "crime" of exposing US and UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over a hundred Palestinian journalists have been slaughtered and their families have been murdered too; Assange is a political prisoner in Belmarsh for the crime of doing journalism, and these narcissistic ghouls are centring themselves as the victims because members of the public stood in camera shot, laughed at their mate’s diabolical interview techniques, and agreed with the guy he was haranguing and trying to demonise.

Perhaps they’re learning from the depraved political class that they’re in such a sordid symbiotic relationship with? After all, we all saw Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle deliberately whip up an Islamophobic panic to cover up their self-serving parliamentary sabotage.

The politicians blamed unspecified threats from unspecified Muslims to excuse their decision to deliberately rip up the parliamentary rules, and the entire press pack allowed them to cynically change the narrative like that, rather than calling them out and holding them to account.

So maybe it’s no wonder that journalists think they can cover up their embarrassments by making out that the real big media problem these days isn’t the sordid symbiotic relationship between the political press and the Westminster establishment politicians they’re supposed to be holding to account, but the women in the background who laughed when Sky’s Sam Coates badgered George Galloway again about his lack of respect for the Prime Minister!