The upstart station has a loyal and growing audience. But a cabal of politicians, broadcasters and campaigners are determined to see it fail
Source - Daily Telegraph 28/12/23
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.
If you imagine a Left-Right scale going from one to 10 with one being extreme Right and 10 being extreme Left where do our broadcasters sit? I would put the BBC at six and a half along with Sky and ITN, with Channel 4 at between seven and eight; this comfortable Left-wing hegemony is challenged by GBN which I would put around three and a half.
Inevitably the media regulator Ofcom has been drawn into the fight. In the past year, there have been a record number of GBN referrals to Ofcom alleging breaches of the broadcasting code – currently there are about a dozen investigations underway. One was settled recently when the regulator found that GBN’s campaign to preserve cash broke the rules. Ofcom found that in its coverage the station hadn’t given sufficient weight to other viewpoints; it did point out, though, that it wasn’t taking issue with the campaign objectives.
Senior people in GB News worry that Ofcom is being weaponised against them; this welter of referrals is, they believe, an attempt to put pressure on the regulator to bear down heavily. There have been complaints that Ofcom has given GBN too much latitude by, for instance, giving its approval for active politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg to present programmes. Ofcom itself says that this is allowed because Rees-Mogg’s programme (which should be on every thinking Conservatives’ media diet) is “current affairs” not “news”. Ofcom says that Ress-Mogg wouldn’t be allowed to present a news bulletin but there’s nothing to stop him hosting a discussion programme.
Fair enough, you might think. Not so, according to another journalistic luminary – Stewart Purvis, the former boss of ITN – who warned in Broadcast magazine that “…the freedom of expression camp has taken over at Ofcom. They’ve taken over at Ofcom from people who thought they had a role to use regulation to protect the public interest”. This is a most illuminating quote. You would rather hope (wouldn’t you?) that every journalist was in the “freedom of expression camp”.
And as for using regulation to “protect the public interest” – protect from what, exactly? To protect the public from hearing views that might not reflect the group-think that dominates all the other outlets perhaps? If so, good riddance to the end of that system.
Purvis thinks there’s been a clandestine change of rules at Ofcom which allows GBN to get away with things; Ofcom responded saying the rules haven’t changed since 2005. But the pressure on Ofcom did lead to one of its senior figures, Adam Baxter, head of enforcement, to tell Broadcast: “We’re not taking our foot off the gas with GB News because we know there are important decisions and there’s a lot of interest in them.” Which seems an open invitation to GBN’s enemies to keep the complaints rolling in.
The media establishment is clearly not about to give up the fight to strangle the life out of GB News, but the company can take heart from the words of Ofcom’s boss Lord Grade. In a speech last month he said: “At the heart of Ofcom is the promotion of free speech and freedom of expression...we are not in the business of stifling innovation.”
If Ofcom holds true to that bold declaration there is little danger of GB News actually losing its licence to broadcast. But the journey to establishing it as a major player in the British media scene is likely to be long and bruising.
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