Why GB News has its Left-leaning rivals rattled and running scared.
The upstart station has a loyal and growing audience. But a cabal of politicians, broadcasters and campaigners are determined to see it fail
Robin Aitken28 December 2023 • 1:03pm
The media establishment rather gave the game away back in September when BBC’s Newsnight staged a typically smug one-sided debate about GB News. Caroline Nokes (the strangely leftish Tory MP for Romsey and Southampton North) and Adam Boulton (formerly the political oracle of Sky News) were of one mind: GB News should be closed down by Ofcom as soon as possible. The upstart station, Boulton claimed, was upsetting “the delicate ecology” of the British broadcasting scene. And we couldn’t have that.
Mrs Nokes, speaking as the Chair of the Commons Women’s and Equalities select committee, said that GB News hardly mattered because of its “tiny audience” but notwithstanding its supposed insignificance it “should be taken off-air”. GB News’ offence was a decidedly off-colour remark made by one of its presenters – the actor-turned-politician Laurence Fox – about a female journalist. Fox remarked to his smirking co-presenter: “Show me a single self-respecting man who would like to climb into bed with that woman ever.….Who’d want to shag that?” It was the kind thing callow schoolboys say: crass and boorish, an insult better left unspoken let alone broadcast to the nation.
But was it an offence so serious it warranted stripping GB News of its licence to broadcast? The only previous victim of Ofcom’s ultimate sanction in recent years was RT – Russia Today – which lost its licence in March 2022 for blatant, propagandistic bias in its coverage of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Did Fox’s quip come anywhere near that level of offence? Most fair-minded people would say not; and if it deserved the maximum punishment what about the transgressions of other stations? Should the BBC have been “shut down” because of Jimmy Savile’s crimes? In truth, if Ofcom set the bar that low would we have any broadcasters left at all? In any event, GB News took pre-emptive action, and Fox was sacked to placate its critics – of whom there are many. Because GB News does not lack for enemies, and while the pressure they are heaping on the station is uncomfortable it’s also a backhanded compliment; GBN has its rivals rattled.
The anguished pleas of Nokes and Boulton to close down GB News betrays the deep nervousness in liberal circles about the success of a station they passionately hoped would fail. After a much-mocked, error-strewn launch in 2021 the channel is making solid gains in all the traditional categories of viewing and listening (GBN output is available as a radio service) whilst growth in its online news website has been explosive. In the past year traffic on the site has grown by nearly 600 per cent. Company insiders boast that its website has now registered more than one billion views – a figure that ITN’s website took 11 years to reach. Not bad for a station that is only two and a half years old.
The online offering is punchy and tabloid. One look at it will tell you about GB News’ political outlook – there’s very little overlap between its content and that, say, of the BBC website. The station believes the website has great potential; staffing is being beefed up and the channel is also specifically expanding its coverage of US news. It thinks there is an appetite among Americans for news from Britain from a right-of-centre viewpoint – something they won’t be getting from the hugely successful BBC operation in the USA.
But though GB News has a loyal and growing audience (it regularly beats its rivals, like Sky and TalkTV particularly in the evening) it still faces many problems – the most serious being the ongoing boycott by big-name advertisers. The first full year accounts – to May 2022 the figures showed a loss of £30.7 million and the company is still not close to being profitable.
It will have to make a profit to survive but to do so it will have to overcome the sustained hostility of vested interests plus the campaign by the activist group Stop Funding Hate (SFH) which is determined to starve the station of advertising revenue. SFH has been quite successful up to this point thanks to its ability to muster Twitter mobs which scare off potential advertisers who fear being associated with supposedly “hateful” output.
SFH is everything you would expect of a Left-wing pressure group; its hallmark is its absolute opposition to free speech. It is dedicated to censoring views of which it does not approve and one has some sympathy; it must be painful to dedicate yourselves to political objectives which are always rejected by the voters. But while it’s easy to understand SFH’s motivation it’s more difficult to sympathise with the growing queue of journalists who also want to shut GBN down. Adam Boulton is not alone; Michael Crick, in many ways an estimable reporter, is of like mind. And the Today presenter Nick Robinson also wants GB News brought to book.
There’s something shocking about senior journalists calling for other journalists, mostly younger and less well-paid people, to lose their jobs. What exactly is going on here? Essentially it is a fightback by vested interests who have no interest whatsoever in the “delicate ecology” being disturbed. Why so? Because for decades mainstream broadcasting has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the liberal left; which it turns out is only “liberal” as long as it gets its own way. DT.
