Bearly Newsworthy: The Things They Told You To Be Angry About This Week
This week's digest of the UK's most performative outrage - lovingly filtered so you don't have to doomscroll.
This is Bearly Newsworthy - the Friday offshoot of Bearly Politics, an independent publication about politics, power and the absurd reality show that we call “the news.” I’m - a healthcare strategist by day, writer by accident and now part time curator of media-induced migraines.
If you’re new here, welcome. If you’re not, thank you for coming back.
If you are having any trouble reading everything by email, (I got a warning the post was too long) reading through your browser should give a better experience.
Since leaving X about two weeks ago I noticed something rather strange - I have more time. I realise now, in retrospect, that there were huge swathes of my day that were taken up by ingesting a steady supply of anxiety inducing content. Worse than that, I would inevitably post my own outrage - my immense annoyance at something a politician said to only then proceed to spend hours in the comments jousting with what were, in all likelihood bots sitting in a basement in Moscow.
It really is amazing just how much your schedule frees up when you stop trying to win arguments with people that don’t exist1.
There’s another advantage though, outside of just a normalisation of blood pressure - you also start noticing the world again - including just how incredibly bizarre the news cycle in the UK actually is when you’re not being shouted at about it all the time and start actually reading the news.
So, on that note, I’ve made the decision to turn my angry-Twitter time into something slightly more productive2 - a Friday segment for Bearly Politics called Bearly Newsworthy in which I round up the week’s stories that are either:
Barely Newsworthy, or in other words the stuff so inflated, misleading or downright ridiculous that it should barely qualify as journalism, or;
Bearly Newsworthy, those stories that genuinely matter but get buried under all the noise.
For the first edition, what better place to start than with a pub, a beheading and a journalist who is desperate to make it about wokeness.
Date: 7 October 2025
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy
In British journalism there are moments when an article, in and of itself, becomes a piece of pure, unadulterated performance art. This is one of them.
The Telegraph devoted an entire damned article (and presumably paid someone for it) to report on a pub that had the sheer audacity to change its name - to what it was originally known as - from The Silent Woman to The Angel.
Reading the piece, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a local councillor had imposed gender-neutral snack bars in all public buildings, when what actually happened is that a private company spent £250k on refurbishing a pub in Dorset and decided to restore the name by which it was known for 400 years.
The story is, of course, not about pubs in Dorset at all - it’s just yet another episode in the ongoing culture wars model that the Telegraph has attached itself to. Outrage pays, clicks add up and the headline practically writes itself:
“ANOTHER TRADITION DESTROYED BY THE WOKE MOB - PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN!”
Only there really was no mob3 - just a brewery doing some rebranding, completely and totally barely newsworthy.
Date: 7 October 2025
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy
The greatest danger to Britain’s future, according to the Telegraph, isn’t the right-wing party flirting incredibly openly with authoritarianism and seems to think the “Great Replacement Lite” is a policy platform - no, no, according to Annabel Denham it’s… double checks to make sure… Human Resources. Yes. The so-called “lanyard class”, the hall monitors of modern Britain - those terribly conniving agents, also known as Sandra who occasionally reminds you that you need to do your mandatory training.
The column by Denham reads like the political equivalent of a seance where someone accidentally summons the spirit of a Daily Mail editorial piece from the early 2010s.
There are grave warnings of “institutional capture” by “progressivism” - an ideology that at this stage is so incredibly vague it could mean anything from equal pay to vegetarianism - and strongly suggests that NHS Trusts, universities and even waste management firms have turned into the incubating vessels of Marxism indoctrination.
The evidence for these claims? A Policy Exchange Report, a lanyard and pure, uncontrolled vibes4.
We have, of course, seen this done before - inflate bureaucracy into its own conspiracy, rebrand any sort of empathy as extremism and loudly insist that the real radicals are people asking not to be racially abused in the workplace.
The only thing that’s creeping here isn’t “progressivism” - it’s the new habit of normalising fearmongering about it. I will add though that if the Right insists on choosing diversity training as a hill to die on - let them. At least it should come with a feedback form.
Date: 8 October 2025
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy
GB News loves to tell its viewers that it is “The Home of Free Speech”, except it turns out that basically meant “free to repeat anything that the Geriatric Orange Game Show Host once said, including the bits about bleach.”
Their new Late Show Live - broadcast directly from what seems to have become occupied Washington DC - is, from the first few weeks at least, what happens to Fox News when it gets a concussion in the midlands. It has everything:
Vaccine denialism - check!
Climate conspiracies - check!
Misinformation about how many people speak English on a certain street - check!
An actual co-owner begging MAGA supporters to “come and save Britain” - check!
The hosts - GB News’s very own in-house Anti-Vaxxer, Bev Turner and Ben “haven’t heard of him but he blocked me on Twitter” Leo - are in a constant near swoon over Donald Trump and give the feeling that they’re auditioning to be on The Apprentice: Collapse of Civilisation Edition. They spend large parts of their show calling for Farage to become Prime Minister, while between segments they inform their viewers of the dangers of Paracetamol causing autism, that climate change is a scam and that the army should be deployed against asylum seekers.
Honestly, it’s the kind of broadcast fever-dream that makes Alex Jones look like the BBC Weather5.
It’s an embarrassing transatlantic suck-up - a culture war import with its own red hats, fake facts and God Complex. When your British news channel broadcasts on Trump’s streaming service, it stops being free speech and starts being foreign influence with a few subtitles.
Date: 9 October 2025
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy
Something I have learnt over the past few years is just how quickly a moral panic can be baptised - in the Telegraph’s headline this week there was a grave warning (again), that banning conversion therapy - a practice which has been condemned by every credible medical and psychological body in the United Kingdom - would somehow “criminalise” Christian teachings.
It doesn’t and won’t - unless your understanding of Christianity includes exorcisms, food deprivation and abuse or trying to “pray the gay away.”
The reason why this is Bearly Newsworthy is down to the framing that the Telegraph has chosen - by using source quotes around therapy and juxtaposing church leaders as the aggrieved victims, the piece pretty effectively blurs the line between what could be considered faith, and what is actual harm. No one is being told they can’t pray or express their religious beliefs - what’s being challenged, and rightly so, is coercion and the systematic, and sometimes institutional, attempts to make LGBTQ+ people ashamed of who they are.
Even the CoE, not exactly a den of radical progressives, supports a full ban on the practice, yet, somehow, the Telegraph has chosen to cast empathy as extremism and the prevention of life-long trauma as tyrany.
This really is one issue where it’s high time we stop mistaking cruelty for conviction and start calling conversion therapy what it actually is: institutional psychological violence and abuse.
Date: 6 October 2025
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy
The excuse that the BBC gave was that it needed “more coverage of the Manchester synagogue attack”, which would be perfectly viable if it weren’t for the fact that Polanski is both Jewish and from Manchester. There has to come a point where you realise that cancelling a Jewish politician from Manchester to cover an antisemitic attack in Manchester that it goes beyond bad optics and starts to show up a worrying institutional incoherence.
Sources revealed to Bienkov that the truth is far simpler, though much more corrosive - the BBC has internalised years of right-wing bullying. Living in a constant state of terror at yet another Daily Mail or Telegraph fannywobble about “lefty bias”, it has now massively overcorrected into a nearly comical submission.
The BBC has, unfortunately, lost its balance in the pursuit of “impartiality”, and it’s the reason why so many of us now trust independent outlets like Byline Times more than the nation’s own public broadcaster.
Date: 7 October 2025
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy
Rob “Generic” Jenrick has been at it again this week at the Tory Conference - this time around “blasting” judges, as described by The Sun, for being “biased referees” for the temerity of… applying the law.
It’s a statement that sounds terribly punchy from a conference stage and completely preposterous anywhere else. Jenrick’s main gripe (for that day at least) is that judges ensuring that deportations of migrants comply with human rights law is the equivalent of handing out questionable penalties in extra time.
Wildly brandishing a judge’s wig like a prop from a bad panto - and looking for all the world like a man holding up a ventriloquists dummy, shouting at it for disobedience - he pledged to scrap the independent appointments system and instead let politicians hand-pick the judiciary like times gone past6.
His soundbites may have gone down well with a base that’s been fed a steady stream of anti-institutionalism over the past 10 years, but landed like a cup of cold sick for anyone who cares even slightly about the foundations of British democracy.
Date: 7 October 2025
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy
In The Express’s latest Brexit melodrama, they’ve cast the EU as some sort of jilted ex-lover - one who has presumably had a glass of wine too many and has started hysterically plotting “revenge” through tariffs, because according to them any sort of trade policy that may negatively affect the UK now doubles as emotional warfare.
We’re led to believe that the EU isn’t responding to the consequences of Trump’s insane tariffs, it has taken aim directly at Keir Starmer, and that somewhere Ursula von der Leyen is cackling megalomaniacally over a map of Scunthorpe.
The reality of the situation is that this tariff adjustment applies worldwide and has been in discussion for months, and the problem isn’t European hostility toward the UK - it’s our own self-imposed strategic irrelevance since we made the conscious decision to leave the trading bloc that sets the rules.
The UK Steel crisis is real - there are no doubts about that7 - but its roots are domestic and related to sky-high energy costs, fragmented policy and chronic underinvestment.
There just is no “revenge” being plotted here - it’s just the inevitable consequence of the UK choosing isolation over influence, and The Express can blame Brussels all they want, but the rust on the British steel industry started long before this headline was written.
Date: 9 October 2025
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy
On top of the already identified “lanyard class” and Human Resources employees identified as the true source of the UK’s issues, The Express has added another culprit to the mix: contemporary dance.
In an article that reads like a terribly aggrieved, and slightly deranged, letter from someone who lost out in a local theatre production call, The Express warns that “foreign dancers and photographers” are being allowed into the United Kingdom as “crucial workers” - a policy in their eyes so deranged and dangerous it may just end civilisation as we know it.
The outrage that they want you to feel on this subject depends on the idea that temporary visas for niche creative roles directly deprive “thousands of young people” of work. What it of course doesn’t say is that many of these roles are available because the UK’s creative industries are immensely internationally collaborative and there’s no mention that these visas last barely long enough for a West End run8. No, no - The Express would like you to believe that this is the inevitable invasion of jazz hands that we’ve all be dreading.
It’s worth repeating, like I did earlier this week, that the creative sector is one of the few areas where the UK still leads on a global level, yet right-wing commentators will remain convinced that the nation will collapse in on itself if a Lithuanian ballerina gets a six-month contract to come perform Swan Lake.
And that’s the news for this week - or at least the news that caught my eye while I was trying very hard not to shout at headlines so much.
I’ll be back with more Bearly Newsworthy stories next week Friday that are either Bearly or Barely worth your time. In the meantime, if you do spot something particularly absurd - or actually important - please send it over to me. You can DM me or email me at iratusursusmajor@gmail.com.
I can’t promise that everything will make the cut, but I can promise I’ll read it - very likely while muttering darkly to myself about the decline of Western civilisation.
This publication is wholly powered by caffeine, mild annoyance and readers like you. There is no corporate backing here (not even a modest cheque from Mr Soros, though I live in hope). If you found this worth reading, please consider a funded subscription.
Or if you’d prefer, please feel free to share this with someone who enjoys a bit of political masochism with their morning coffee.
Either way, thank you for reading.
Also, much more accessible than therapy, though arguably not as effective.
There are, of course, healthier ways of dealing with unresolved anger, but very few of them come with footnotes.
Still, give it a week, we’re just a few headlines away from someone claiming that migrants forced them to change the name.
Which in fairness is more evidence than most so-called “think-tanks” generally manage.
And yet, somewhere, OfCom is gently napping next to a stack of pre-prepared strongly worded letters.
Or rather times current in the US, and just look how well that’s going for them.
And if you squint just hard enough you can almost see ten years of austerity behind the smoke caused by articles like these.
A side point here and what should have also been mentioned is that the arts in the UK have now been purposefully underfunded for years now, and this may in fact be a contributing factor. Just saying.
Useful, Bear, for those of us who haven't the stomach to read the right-wing press or watch GB News. Brave of you to take one for the team and do it for us. Thank you!
“Heaven’s Customer Service Line Is Still Busy (Press 1 for Plagues)”
We gathered to pray away the gay,
while the Thames caught fire on a Tuesday.
Children starved, the rich got fatter,
but God’s real focus? Bedroom chatter.
A choir of moral panic sang,
their pitch as sharp as a Daily Mail pang.
They banned rainbows, taxed compassion,
and called it “traditional family fashion.”
We passed the plate, ignored the flood,
and sprinkled hate with holy mud.
The vicar shouted, “Love the sinner!”
then billed them £20 for the dinner.
Meanwhile, heaven’s helpdesk took a call:
“Hi, yes, the planet’s about to fall.”
Saint Peter sighed, “We’re short-staffed, mate,
but we’ve cured a bisexual in Colgate.”
They blessed a tank, condemned a kiss,
and blamed the gays for the ozone’s hiss.
A dove returned with smoke and debt,
but at least no lesbians own a jet.
And when the angels checked the score,
Earth rang up: “Er, third world war?”
God said, “Sorry, lads, I’ve got to stay,
Karen’s upset her son’s gone gay.”
Amen, they cried, with moral grace,
then tripped on logic’s broken face.
If heaven’s PR runs this show,
I’ll take the sinners, they’ve better flow.