News
Decades after Rupert Murdoch stormed the British news industry, another Australian is drawing viewers from Sky to his right-wing ‘disruptor’, GB News. By Amy Fallon.
GB News is the next Australian ‘disruptor’ in British media
After months and months of broadcasting “Tory MP after Tory MP after Tory MP, two leaders of the Brexit Party and hardly any Labour MPs”, as veteran British journalist Michael Crick described it in November last year, there was a golden opportunity for a change in programming at GB News.
Nigel Farage, also known as “Mr Brexit”, had taken the week off from the free-to-air news and current affairs channel.
There were “67 million” possible fill-ins, says Crick, a regular GB News guest and former BBC political editor who left Channel 4 years earlier because, he said, of its left-wing bias. But the new broadcaster chose Farage’s successor. Richard Tice is the leader of Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party that Farage headed.
Crick was unequivocal in his criticism during a segment on free speech: “I think [British communications regulator] Ofcom, who are one of the weakest institutions on the planet, should get a grip on you lot.” This, following his statement live on air that he had called for the channel to be shut down, saw Crick booted from the studio.
GB News is a relative newcomer in British broadcasting and attracted plenty of attention in Australia recently with its interview of Donald Trump by Farage, in which the former United States president and Republican nominee for this year’s election described Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd as “a little bit nasty” and “not the brightest bulb”. The question that elicited those observations was drafted by the head of Sky News Australia, Paul Whittaker, to appeal to antipodean viewers – and at the request of his predecessor and the current GB News chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos.
Frangopoulos has helmed the station since its launch nearly three years ago, aiming to attract Britons disillusioned with the major broadcasters. Although GB News is not widely watched, with an audience share of only 0.59 per cent among British TV and broadband households in February 2024, versus more than 33 per cent for the BBC, the newcomer has gained some traction among those dissatisfied and distrusting of conventional news outlets. And it’s drawing particularly from the right-wing audience of another former Australian-led upstart – Murdoch outlet Sky News.
In September 2022, Frangopoulos told the Media Masters podcast that GB News viewed itself as “the mainstream” media and the existing media as “very much the establishment”. In December that year, GB News beat Sky on average monthly prime-time viewers for the first time. This month, another Murdoch broadcast, TalkTV network, which harbours presenter Piers Morgan, announced it was moving from television to online only. Its statement noted “audiences of all ages have moved fast and smartphones are now the primary device where news is consumed”.
GB News posted a pre-tax loss of £42.4 million in the year through May 2023, but that may not be a problem for its owner, London-based holding company All Perspectives Ltd, backed by hedge fund manager Paul Marshall and investment firm Legatum.
The channel claims “impartiality and integrity” at the core of its “commitment to delivering authoritative and accurate news the public trust”, while declaring “we are disruptors”. Its first show featured segments on top culture war issues: cross-Channel migration, England football players “taking the knee” as a statement against racism and the delay on the Covid lockdown lift by then prime minister Boris Johnson.
Its struggles to attract both presenters and guests have been well documented, but GB News has had some success with higher-profile hires Farage, veteran comedian John Cleese and, as was announced late last year as a 2024 addition, Johnson himself. From a low audience base, such additions have helped to spur strong growth. And Farage’s March 19 interview with Trump from Mar-a-Lago was “gold dust”, or so one GB News presenter bragged on air.
The broadcaster, which is calling itself the “election channel” as Britain prepares to go to the polls, is generating more headlines elsewhere for its impartiality breaches.
This month, Ofcom found that between May and June last year, GB News broke its impartiality rules on five occasions, when “host politicians acted as newsreaders, interviewers or reporters in sequences that clearly constituted news – including reporting breaking news events – without exceptional justification”.
The instances, which marked the seventh breach of the regulator’s broadcasting code in two years, involved Conservative MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg, the member for North East Somerset who hosts a nightly program; Esther McVey, the member for Tatton; and her husband Philip Davies, who represents Shipley in West Yorkshire.
Yet, in a move that has many scratching their heads, Ofcom did not sanction GB News, taking into account the broadcaster had not previously breached these sections of its code (previous infringements have concerned other aspects of impartiality and misinformation). It put GB News “on notice” that any repeated breaches of its rules may lead to a “statutory sanction”.
Neither GB News nor Legatum responded to several requests by The Saturday Paper for comment.
GB News plays “God Save the King” at dawn daily. It has comedians review the papers because “when the establishment has gone crazy you need some craziness to make sense of it”. One evening presenter, Patrick Christys, says on the ad for his program “it’s news, but it’s this close to entertainment”, holding up two barely separated fingers.
Programming mainly revolves around the culture wars, immigration and “stopping the boats” – an Australian slogan now adopted by the British political establishment – plus the royals. GB News’s latest political expert is former Neighbours actor Holly Valance, who used an exclusive interview this month to disown her motherland Australia for being too “woke”.
In a week, former Australian Liberal Party senator George Brandis was a guest on the show and former Liberal foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer put in an appearance. Former prime minister Scott Morrison had been scheduled shortly before the story about Catherine, the Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnosis broke.
The channel has continued gathering serving Conservative members of parliament to its ranks of presenters, and this model is taken – albeit lopsidedly – from London-based phone-in and talk radio station LBC about a decade ago, Crick tells The Saturday Paper. “They achieved a certain amount of balance because they’d have a left-wing politician at one time of the day and a right-wing one at another time of the day,” he says.
Crick, who describes himself as a “centrist” and “pluralist”, says Ofcom was acting with “breathtaking incompetence” by being so slow to act on the channel’s infringements and that it was “absolutely disgraceful” for a taxpayer-funded regulator.
Speaking of the withdrawal of rival TalkTV within just two years of launching, Crick says Murdoch was widely expected to beat GB News, and instead “the total reverse has happened”.
“There is a coherence about GB News. It’s not a coherence I agree with. But there is a coherence about GB News and more of a sense of fun than TalkTV.”
Tom Chivers, head of policy at the Media Reform Coalition, which advocates for a “democratic and accountable” press, tells The Saturday Paper TalkTV’s move demonstrates only that “Murdoch is above all else a savvy businessman and won’t throw good money after bad”. He adds, “Paul Marshall, on the other hand, clearly has his eyes on political influence, using GB News to build a media movement of prominent right-wing politicians and commentators.”
Chivers points out that neither GB News nor TalkTV were successful in the traditional sense. “The broadcast news industry is facing serious challenges, and advertisers are even less likely to spend on channels that promote conspiracy theories or political extremism,” he says. “But GB News certainly has been successful in providing already-powerful figures – serving Conservative MPs, mainstream right-wing commentators and online controversialists – another platform to polarise audiences and foment political division.”
The audience growth of both channels is more online than in broadcast, says Stephen Cushion, professor at the school of journalism, media and culture at Cardiff University. “GB News’s editorial team is working hard to push this content online and across platforms such as TikTok to appeal to younger viewers who will probably not be engaging with live content on its news channel,” he says.
As the British election looms, many are waiting for Ofcom, which still has eight investigations into GB News in the pipeline, to start imposing penalties for misconduct.
Cushion said research, including his own, showed the public valued impartial journalism. Ofcom is currently producing a study on attitudes towards broadcast programs that may help further assess what the public understands impartiality to be. He hoped this would be published before the election and the regulator’s rules clarified.
Crick stresses that balanced broadcasting will remain an issue beyond the election. He maintains he appeared on GB News because he felt strongly that alternative views needed to be put forward.
“One of the reasons why Remain lost the [Brexit] referendum is that for years and years and years people who believed in the European Union weren’t prepared to make the case. I think there’s that danger now with net zero.”
For now, the British public is still bound by respect for the media’s role, he adds. “If you let standards drop and you just say it’s a free-for-all, [things] become much more polarised as it has in America with the knock-on effect on their politics. Trump was basically created by Fox News, although Murdoch now deeply regrets it. You can see GB News is going the same way.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 30, 2024 as "Mad as hell".
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