If you have not been watching GB News as much as I have in the past week, you may well not hold the belief that a principal focus of the world’s current affairs is the village of Kegworth in Leicestershire.
A fortnight ago, a hotel in the village was taken over by Home Office agencies to house 250 asylum seekers. GB News led on those reports, and then provided rolling news coverage of subsequent small-scale local protests, with a series of often repeated and tweeted interviews with villagers, and a livestream from outside the parish council meeting in the pub. This content was then used to fuel the on-screen debate to support what might be the unofficial slogan of the channel: “Not far right, just right.”
This news cycle of report, whipped-up anger and obsessive analysis is a familiar one to viewers of the channel, which compulsively promotes the most significant post-Brexit growth industry: the manufacture of partisan outrage.
The previous week, something similar had happened with the news that the Honor Oak pub in Lewisham, south London, was hosting a “magical storytelling session” for children led by a drag artist. Once again, news, reported anger on the streets (if Turning Point extremists appeared alongside megaphone-wielding GB News host Calvin Robinson, that couldn’t be helped) and then nonstop commentary.
There are other topics on rotation on “Britain’s news channel” – the Duke and Duchess of Sussex demanding their daughter be called “princess” and scaremongering about Covid vaccines.
But still, watched over a period of time, the station seems primed to return to its playlist of hits. Performative disgust about the perceived sexualisation of kids (by the “LGBT lobby”) is one strand of this, along with the almost casual drip-fed inference that rootless refugees in our towns and cities are a threat to teenage girls.
Watched back to back, GB News days take on a familiar trajectory; the mornings, featuring the likes of Eamonn Holmes and Alastair Stewart and Angela Rippon, offer a sort of legacy affability (simultaneously broadcast, like all the channel’s output, on radio). As the day goes on, however, that hardens into something far more unhinged. At the end of the Kegworth day, for example, the late-night presenter Patrick Christys was in a one-on-one interview with former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, a regular fixture among the talking heads. MacKenzie was angrily suggesting the only way the Tories could “stop the boats” and win the next election was to send the SAS on a systematic shoot-to-kill operation against people smugglers: “Just kill 20 or 30 of them,” he said.
Christys laughed and then looked into the camera to confirm: “We are talking jovially … not advocating violence.” “I am,” MacKenzie insisted. The brandedclip was pushed out on to the channel’s various platforms – Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and the rest.
The GB News studios are in a canalside basement in the Paddington Basin development in west London. There has, since the channel’s launch 21 months ago, always been a siege mentality about its output. Veteran political broadcaster Andrew Neil, its short-lived star turn in the first few weeks, called it “the bunker” and not only for its initial doom-laden lighting problems.
That impression, Michael Booker, the station’s news editor suggests, is useful in creating us-against-the-world loyalties. Booker was previously editor of the Sunday Express. Speaking to me in a two-person transparent office pod off the station’s news floor last week, he suggested that, because he had no TV experience when he came to the channel, his aim was to create something like an “old-style tabloid” mentality among staff and viewers: “Make it more like a newspaper, you know, somewhere where people want to go and feel they belong.”
Angelos Frangopoulos has been chief executive of GB News since the beginning. He was hired from Sky News Australia, having been in near the launch of Sky in the UK in 1989. He likes to think his channel has a “pirate spirit”. His mission, he suggests, is to build a “people’s channel” that reaches – in the manner of the Brexit referendum – those left behind by “the metropolitan media”.
To some extent that message – rammed home hour by hour during advertising breaks dominated by self-promotion – is getting through. On screens around a tightly packed newsroom are live graphs showing audience trends and breakdowns. Though only measured in the low tens of thousands, there is data to suggest that GB News now routinely outperforms Sky News and the BBC news channel in the former “red wall” seats of the north-west and the north-east, where the next election will probably be contested.
The channel, which has a sketchy network of lone regional correspondents, aims to reach that audience not by close local reporting, but by feeding it divisive lines from London. You can best measure its effect in those constituencies, Frangopoulos suggests, by the fact that Labour politicians, who initially steered clear of the channel, now appear on its sofas. “They come on because they have the same data we have,” Frangopoulos says. “They know that whole patch is going to win or lose them government.”
Booker, who insists on no political allegiance – “We just want to make something that is interesting to watch” – believes he understands that battleground well. He grew up in Durham. “I was driving through Sunderland recently,” he says. “And I just thought: ‘These people, they all feel like GB News viewers.’”
By which he means? “People the other channels don’t really listen to.”
And he thinks that the primetime hosts who best understand those people are Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg?
“I’d like an exciting Labour MP to have their own show on here as well,” he says, “because that’s what makes it fun. Angela Rayner could have a show – that’d be fantastic.”
In the meantime, last week, GB News unveiled its new talent: Lee Anderson MP will get a regular slot (cementing the idea that this is the natural home of headbanger Tories), while Christopher Hope, the Daily Telegraph’s longtime political editor, has been hired to generate more stories from Westminster.
Those hires come in the face of two significant news releases. One, on Monday, saw the channel sanctioned for the first time by the regulator Ofcom after an investigation into a broadcast last April involving presenter Mark Steyn, who claimed that there was a cover-up of deaths related to the third Covid booster jab. Ofcom ruled that his show “presented a materially misleading interpretation of official data … risking harm to viewers”.
GB News had pre-emptively parted company from Steyn, who suffered two heart attacks before Christmas and worked mainly from his home in Canada. Steyn refused to sign a new contract including a clause that made the presenter himself liable for any fines that the regulator might impose. He described the new contract as evidence that the channel’s in-house compliance officer was now “Ofcom’s bitch”.
The second news item was perhaps more concerning for the channel’s future. Its published accounts for the year ending May 2022 revealed a loss of more than £30m on only £3.6m turnover (£3m from advertising and £550,000 in digital revenue). Staff costs, well before the expensive hires of Rees-Mogg and co, stood at £12.75m. The company’s backers, Sir Paul Marshall, the Brexit-supporting hedge fund tycoon, and Legatum, the Dubai-based investment vehicle of New Zealand billionaire Christopher Chandler, reportedly remained supportive.
The losses – and the nature of recent appointments – point to the idea that the owners are measuring the progress of the channel not by its bottom line but by its influence in shifting debate to the right – more as a political than a media organisation.
Addressing the channel’s precarious finances, Frangopoulos points to the growth in audiences since last spring (GB News claims 2.8 million viewers a month, a 22% increase year on year) along with encouraging data from other platforms (it has more than 700,000 YouTube subscribers). He also suggests that the competition provided by Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV can only expand the audience and has no regrets in failing to hire Piers Morgan (GB News’s offer, he has joked, was a zero short of Murdoch’s).
The continuing advertising boycott, in response to the channel’s brand of political extremism, has been mitigated, he argues, by a new focus on “non-London advertising agencies”.
Are those financial facts not, even so, evidence that GB News needs to ditch its more extreme content – the conspiracist monologues of Neil Oliver, for example, who recently argued that there was a coordinated masterplan to bring in rationing – in order to survive commercially?
Frangopoulos does not see that argument. “The fact you are talking about Neil Oliver’s piece proves that it provokes debate,” he says.
One of the effects of the Ofcom investigations is GB News presenters now routinely play the part of pantomime martyrs who refuse to be silenced by the “government censor”.
I ask Booker if the new liability clause in Steyn’s contract was a warning to Laurence Fox and others that they too might have to put their money where their free speech is, in the event of fines? “We do Ofcom training for everyone,” he says. “It was offered to Mark, but he didn’t do it.”
Ofcom rules require GB News to include an alternative point of view in every opinion segment; though the figure is not spelt out, it is understood that the channel must include about 20% “impartial” content – mostly provided by the hourly news bulletins.
Frangopoulos and Booker insist that, even if they wanted to, it would be impossible to create a Fox News in Britain because of the presence of the regulator. Nevertheless, GB News borrows the primary tactics of the US channel. Above all, it wants to narrow the concerns of its viewers to a handful of stories guaranteed to provoke the most visceral emotion. Part of that has to do with resources: GB News has 250 staff; the BBC has 22,000. While GB News imagines itself as a force for “plurality”, its reporting is pretty much confined to whatever divisive frontlines of culture it can invent.
The effect reminds you that editorial or political bias comes in many forms, but its most insidious one is probably stubborn magnification of single issues. The great strength of the BBC historically has been not its depth but its breadth; it has the resources to put the world in context.
In the world of GB News, however, complex stories are simplified and overemphasised to fill the sky; they then become self-fulfilling prophecies. The shrill contortions of its “free-speech defenders” finding arguments for the BBC to silence Gary Lineker became a case in point. The “liberty loving” channel was among the loudest of those demanding the witch-hunt, to which the BBC shamefully acquiesced. In the meantime the scandal of the government’s ideological inaction and scapegoating of refugees was only amplified. Did Mick Booker not think that the channel’s obsessive coverage of asylum issues drove nothing but division and anger?“I think people on the doorsteps say to MPs that is one of the biggest things that they will vote around,” he said. “We started doing more of it than most. But now it’s become a huge national story.”
In this respect, somewhat bleak ironies are built into the station’s output. Every half an hour or so, throughout the day, Farage appears as part of a looped promotion for the “people’s channel”. Each time he appears, he asks viewers the same question: “Britain is broken,” he says. “How on earth did we get into this mess?”
Answers, as they used to say, on a postcard, please.
Troublesome talking heads
Neil Oliver
The archaeologist and former president of the National Trust for Scotland has used his weekly GB News monologues to argue that the pandemic lockdown was the “biggest single mistake in world history”. He has also proposed a belief in a “silent war” to impose “one-world government”, echoing an antisemitic trope and leading the Board of Deputies of British Jews to ask Ofcom to tackle the channel’s indulgence of conspiracy theory.
Laurence Fox
The actor turned “free-speech activist” is a Friday night fixture on the channel. During an interview with Dr Tina Peers on 24 February, a false claim that 58% of women on a Pfizer Covid vaccine trial had suffered miscarriages went unchallenged and was shared on social media. Dr Peers subsequently retracted the claim on Twitter. Ofcom received more than 100 complaints.
Mark Steyn
After one in a series of Ofcom inquiries into the Canadian presenter’s anti-vax claims, Ofcom last week sanctioned GB News for a programme in April 2022 in which Steyn falsely claimed that a Covid booster vaccine “exposed you to a greater risk of infection, hospitalisation and death”. Steyn has left the broadcaster after a proposed change to his contract that made him personally liable for Ofcom fines.
Calvin Robinson
In November, the dog-collar-wearing former Tory council candidate, who hosts Calvin’s Common Sense Crusade on Sunday afternoons, appeared on the channel to amplify the false conspiracy theory that President Zelenskiy of Ukraine was using war as a front for a private money-laundering operation involving the bankrupt FTX crypto platform. The false claim remains on Robinson’s social media.
