Amid US struggles, Murdoch brings Fox playbook to UK

LONDON — Beset by declining ratings, upheaval in its on-air ranks and a multibillion-dollar defamation suit related to its election coverage, Fox News is staggering out of the Trump era — blamed by many for seeding the political culture that brought a violent mob into the halls of the U.S. Capitol last month.

Yet in Britain, where television news is regulated to avoid political bias, Rupert Murdoch and a competing group of investors are seizing this moment to create two upstart news services that will challenge the BBC and other broadcasters by borrowing heavily from Murdoch’s Fox playbook.

If the timing for a pair of brash, right-wing news outlets seems strange given Fox’s recent travails in the United States, it is no less odd in Britain. With the country finally out of the European Union, its bitter political divisions over Brexit have been pushed aside, at least for now, by the grim ordeal of the coronavirus pandemic.

Though these ventures are in competition, they share Murdoch DNA.

Murdoch’s entrant, the less ambitious of the two, hopes to exploit what its executives see as a gap in the British market for edgy commentary and personality-driven programs. The rival venture — GB News, which has different backers but is stocked with veterans of the Murdoch empire — calculates there is an audience for a channel that rejects what it views as the left-leaning political correctness of the BBC.

“British news broadcasting is pretty much a one-party state,” said Andrew Neil, who is the chairman of GB News and will host a prime-time show.

Pronouncements like that set off alarm bells for some British commentators. While Britain has long had a freewheeling, unabashedly partisan newspaper industry, critics say the last thing it needs after Brexit is a Fox-like news channel — one that could sow further divisions and open the door to the kinds of conspiracy theories nurtured by former President Donald Trump, and amplified by Fox.

“Imagine being the country that has watched the last four years unfold in the U.S., with its bloodlines so easily traceable to the Fox sensibility, and is nonetheless thinking: let’s have a bit of that,” wrote Marina Hyde, a columnist at the left-leaning Guardian newspaper. “Because that’s us, of course.”

Last week, critics began an online campaign to pressure cellular carriers, banks and other advertisers to boycott GB News.

Neil struck back at what he called the “woke warriors,” pointing out that they were trying to cancel a channel that had yet to air a program. GB News, he said, would cover issues from the “center, perhaps the center right” — not the hard-right like Fox. Its shows will offer diverse voices and stick to facts, he insisted. Unlike Fox or BBC, GB News won’t air rolling news coverage.

Executives at Murdoch’s venture, known as News UK TV, declined to be interviewed. But privately, they, too, play down comparisons to Fox. Unlike GB News, which is an old-fashioned broadcasting channel, Murdoch is planning a less costly streaming service, akin to Netflix or Now TV, to take advantage of that growing market.

The service, which is to begin a low-key rollout in April, will promote Murdoch’s stable of British media properties, from The Sun, a mass-market tabloid, and The Times, an upmarket broadsheet, to Talk Radio, which offers Rush Limbaugh-style commentary. All skew to the right.

News UK TV will also skip breaking news coverage and feature shows with politically opinionated voices.

LEON NEAL/GETTY-AFP 2016 Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, seen with son Lachlan, is planning two news services in Britain that will borrow from what worked at Fox News.