THE man in his twenties who is addressing the camera is insistent if not forceful. The US media’s responsibility, he tells Americans in his latest must-see video, is to tell them what their government is doing in their name – not to hang onto every tweet issued by an attention-seeking narcissist.

No prizes for guessing that the narcissist in question is Donald Trump. But the young man’s accent is noticeably West of Scotland. He is, moreover, rather stylish, cream-coloured jacket, bow-tie, spotted handerchief in his breast pocket. What is going on?

Francis Maxwell, 27, who is from Clydebank, and once played professional football for Ayr United, is now making his name in the States as a host and producer on The Young Turks, a progressive news channel that claims to be the world’s largest online news show. The flagship show of the TYT Network, it started in 2002 and has had more than two billion total views on its YouTube channel.

Articulate and outspoken (and also not shy of using the F-word for added emphasis), Maxwell believes that the US media’s “infatuation with zooming in on every crevice of [Trump’s] tainted character did nothing but assist in his rise.”

In that same video he lambasts the lack of media coverage over the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen – a crisis that the Obama administration, he adds, has helped to fund.

Maxwell is a welcome progressive voice in an increasingly charged US media landscape after the Republicans’ resounding victory last month, which saw them take the White House and retain their majorities in the House and Senate. He is particularly critical of hardline conservative media voices such as 24-year-old Tomi Lahren who has courted controversy by, among other things, comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Ku Klux Klan.

As Maxwell says on his Facebook page, while he believes that open discussion with Trump supporters is necessary to reach common ground, Lahren “does stand for the worst of his rhetoric, and I will not humor that s---".

First things first. “After school I went to work in the shipyards, at BAE Systems,” Maxwell says down the line from LA. “I was in a mechanical apprenticeship for three years while playing for Ayr on a professional youth contract.

“By January 2010 I knew I wanted to go to the States. My brother had been on a football scholarship when he was younger, in Arkansas, and he highly recommended it. I had my sights on somewhere more glamorous, New York or Los Angeles, and ended up on a football scholarship at Whittier College, in LA. I graduated in 2014 with a major in political science and sociology and later did a Masters in political science.”

One of his college professors, a progressive, showed her class a couple of Young Turks videos. He liked what he saw and – this is cutting a long story short – he ended up at TYT in 2014, initially as a soccer specialist. He later hosted TYT Network’s new fashion channel.

He began extending his personal boundaries, talking about politics with his TYT co-hosts. “I really started to identify where my political view was. While working at TYT I convinced them that I was useful enough to be kept around.

“They sponsored my visa, which keeps me here until 2019. I’ve since been trying to get my opinions to where I feel educated on matters – US, UK, worldwide – and constantly studying and reading.”

He still covers sports but also writes for the Huffington Post and shoots videos for the TYT and hosts weekly Facebook videos. The latter have earned him a sizeable following.

“I believe we get caught up a lot in how left-wing we are, to the point that we push away any form of debate to the other side,” he says of TYT. “That is part and parcel with the US media.

“The US media is so different to the UK’s. I grew up watching the BBC. They have some priorities but generally I think they’re pretty neutral in the way they give you an opinion, but more often than not they’ll give you the news first.

“In the US there’s no distinction between news and opinion. If people watch Fox News, or CNN, they’ll feel that that opinion is actually news. While TYT is far better than that I still think we, at times, convolute what news is with our own opinion on it.”

Personally, he is a Democrat, “progressive in my views, but, to be brutal about it, the election woke me up on how I can’t allow my views, no matter how progressive they are, to shut down any other argument.

“I can’t go along with what a lot of people did on the left wing here. We were condemning anyone with a difference of opinion, demonising their views as the worst of Trump’s rhetoric, demonising everyone who voted for him as racist, xenophobic or sexist. I felt that that had a huge part to play in his rise.”

Maxwell laments a practice that Trump has emboldened and is characterised by Lahren, “which is saying what is at the front of her mind with no regard to what other people are thinking.

“There’s an art to portraying your opinion in a way that is educated but also poses a question rather than just issuing verbal drivel to the point where people are going to get excited or angry in response.”

Maxwell has already done well in what is, when all is said and done, an overcrowded and hugely competitive US media market. He is quietly ambitious. He would like, for example, to explore UK politics for the benefit of TYT’s many viewers. But he is in no indecent rush. “Really,” he says, “the sky’s the limit. I want to continue to push, and see where I end up."

Twitter: @francis_maxwell. Instagram: @francismaxwellhost