Almost every interview President Trump gives is to a billionaire-owned right-wing outlet. That is not an accident of scheduling. It is what media ownership buys: a guaranteed platform, no hostile follow-up, and an audience delivered to your argument.
This week Beverly Turner secured another one-to-one with the President for GB News, in which he repeated his familiar attacks on climate action and promoted the products of the oil billionaires who fund him.
What happened next was unusual, and worth saying plainly: Turner gave the right of reply. She interviewed me three times after the Trump segments aired, and gave me the time to go through the claims one by one. The first of those interviews is below.
Here is what was said, and what is actually true.
Claim 1: Climate change is a hoax.
It is not. Scientists established that carbon dioxide traps heat in the 1850s. Burning fossil fuels releases, in the space of two centuries, carbon that took millions of years to lock away underground. That is why global temperatures are rising.
Claim 2: Fossil fuels are cheaper and safer.
Charging an electric car at home costs around 7p a mile. Petrol costs around 14p. Over 100,000 miles that is roughly £7,000 saved on fuel alone, and many new EVs now cost much the same to buy as their petrol equivalents.
The International Energy Agency has found that solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of new electricity across most of the world.
As for safer: the World Health Organization estimates around seven million premature deaths a year from air pollution, much of it from burning fossil fuels in vehicles and power stations. Nobody dies from renewable energy pollution.
Claim 3: Britain would be rich if we drilled the North Sea.
North Sea oil peaked a generation ago, in 1999. Around 90% of everything that will ever be extracted from it has already been burned. The remaining fields belong to private companies, most of them foreign-owned, and the oil is sold on international markets at international prices. It would not take a penny off a British bill.
Claim 4: China sells wind and solar to the world but doesn’t use it.
China has installed more solar in a single year than the rest of the world put together. It invested early and is now selling the technology to everyone else. Much of east Asia’s oil arrives through the Strait of Hormuz, which is precisely why the region is switching to electric vehicles and renewables as fast as it can.
Claim 5: Britain gets much of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
We get almost none. UK supply comes overwhelmingly from the North Sea, Norway and the United States.
Claim 6: China has been allowed to decarbonise decades after Britain.
China announced in 2020 that it would reach carbon neutrality by 2060 — ten years after the UK’s 2050 target, not decades. Developing countries were given longer on the principle that the countries which caused the problem should fix it first.
Claim 7: UK electricity is the most expensive in Europe because of green energy.
Our wholesale prices — which already include the cost of renewables — are lower than in a dozen other European countries. It is consumer bills that are high, and that is down to how the market is structured and to the returns paid out by privatised energy and network companies. Turner’s response, live on air, was that it was outrageous and she couldn’t agree more.
Claim 8: Britain’s wind turbines all come from China.
They don’t. The overwhelming majority installed here are made in Hull, Scotland, Denmark or Germany. And England had an effective ban on new onshore wind from 2015 until 2024 — blocking the cheapest electricity available, for the better part of a decade.
The point:
At the end of it, Turner said I would be staying with the programme for the rest of the evening to provide some much-needed balance.
That is one presenter, on one evening, making one decision. It is not a system.
The system is that the President of the United States can say all eight of those things to a global audience and, almost every time, never face a single follow-up — because he speaks almost exclusively to outlets owned by people who agree with him. That is what billionaire media ownership is for. Not persuasion. Protection.
And six months into this campaign, not one national newspaper or broadcaster has reported that we exist.
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