Should breakfast TV be abandoned as an utter waste of time as you start the day?

The striking thing here is not the verdict but the mood behind it. This was a vote that split roughly five to four for scrapping breakfast television, yet the single most respected voice in the whole debate was a No voter who thought the question shouldn't have been asked at all, snapping "if you don't want to watch there's an OFF button... use it!"

The Yes case, such as it was, barely engaged with that challenge and instead reached for a familiar target: media bias. One voter explained they backed Yes because they "dislike the growing celebrity culture" and see the BBC pushing "a biased view of events which could easily be accepted as fact rather than opinion," while another was blunter still — "It's all propaganda anyway. Best avoid." A third tied the case to a specific grievance, accusing broadcasters of failing to "cover up the grooming gangs" properly. None of these drew much respect from the floor, but together they formed a coherent thread: distrust of the news, not indifference to the format.

The No side's higher-rated arguments, by contrast, were less about breakfast TV's merits and more about the premise of asking. Beyond the top-rated dismissal, other No voters offered variations on the same shrug — "Choice, if not watched will be scrapped" and "This is matter for owners of these channels to decide and individuals who watch it." The two camps largely talked past each other, one arguing the media is compromised, the other arguing the market will sort it out regardless; a side debate over whether British media leans left or right, complete with a "for every centre or left wing media outlet you name I'll name a rightwing one" challenge, never quite resolved either.

It is a small, self-selected sample rehearsing a much larger argument about trust in broadcasters that runs from Brexit coverage to grooming-gang scandals to the BBC's licence fee, playing out here in miniature over cornflakes and sofa interviews. The vote says abandon it; the respect tally suggests half the room thought even debating it was the real waste of time.