Mistreated to point of humiliation
WILL the BBC rue the day it drove Andrew Neil – by widespread agreement Auntie’s most forensic and best informed political interviewer – into the arms of a fledgling rival news channel?
That is what many will ask following the announcement that Mr Neil is to be chairman of GB News, a new channel that hopes to launch in the first quarter of next year. He will also host its flagship evening programme.
Of course, GB News, which expects to reach almost all British households, would have launched anyway. Its lead investor is Discovery, a multinational media behemoth based in New York and a big player. But with Mr Neil on board it will pack an extra punch.
Why the Beeb chose to mistreat its star interviewer to the point of humiliation remains a mystery. It’s true it has never properly valued him, giving him programmes at odd times of the day and night outside peak time while lesser journalists were cossetted and feted – and offered prime slots.
Mr Neil’s ‘crime’ in the eyes of some Corporation executives was not to be of the Left. Indeed, he once worked in a senior capacity for media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a hated figure at the BBC, though the two men are no longer close.
Even so, the axing of his daytime show, not long after his weekly nightly programme had been killed off, was breathtakingly brutal. For weeks, no one at the BBC bothered to tell him what was going on. Incoming directorgeneral Tim Davie recently attempted to mend fences, but Mr Neil had had enough.
The question is whether GB News will represent any threat to the all-powerful BBC, which with its multiple television channels and radio stations is by far the country’s biggest supplier of news.
According to some estimates, Auntie provides over half the news the public receives. She may protest until the cows come home that this news is delivered in a fair and balanced way, but many millions of people believe otherwise, and discern a leftish, metropolitan bias.
I suspect that, as a single channel with limited resources, GB News will be too small to deliver a knockout blow to the BBC, although it is aiming to produce a significant output of some 18 hours every day.
But its impending launch nonetheless marks an upheaval in British broadcasting. Whilst it will have to operate within impartiality rules policed by media regulator Ofcom, GB News will give vent to a wider range of views on the centre-Right than are to be found at the BBC.
The model appears to be radio stations such as LBC and Talk Radio, where opinionated presenters (occasionally on the Left) stimulate lively informed debate and discussion.
THIS recipe, rather than the rolling news provided by outlets such as Sky, will constitute the bulk of the new channel’s content.
Mr Neil’s enemies on the Left will doubtless accuse him of fronting a British version of Fox News, an American news channel which leans raucously to the Right and makes no pretence of objectivity.
GB News may adopt a similar format but I’d be surprised if its political prejudices were the same as Fox’s – and not only because of the constraints of Ofcom. Though undoubtedly of the Right, Mr Neil is no rabid ideologue. As a BBC interviewer, he was as tough on Tories as on Labour.
More unapologetically Rightwing is the news channel reportedly being contemplated by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, though that too would have to observe Ofcom’s rules. Unless, of course, the Government changes them.
A revolution is underway. Cracks are appearing in the monolithic BBC. Its dominance – and its values – are being challenged. For those who cherish liberty and greater choice, this is both welcome and overdue.