Media Matters
There’s a demand for Andrew Neil’s GB News but it needs big bucks
Andrew Neil should be an inspiration to oldies. At the age of 71, the veteran Scottish journalist is becoming chairman and lead presenter of a new British news channel called GB News. It plans to launch in the first quarter of 2021.
This isn’t a half-baked operation. Its lead investor is Discovery, a vast American media company. GB News expects to reach 96 per cent of British television households via Freeview, Sky and Virgin Media, and will be on air for about 18 hours a day. You could be taking a look at it soon.
If you do, you won’t get the same kind of rolling news provided by the BBC News Channel and Sky News. That’s very expensive. Auntie’s offering costs licence-fee payers £57 million a year, while the annual losses of Sky News are around £40 million.
Making money out of broadcast news is a huge challenge in a country the size of the United Kingdom – and for a new channel looking for viewers in an already crowded market it’s close to impossible.
GB News will be more of a talking shop, with provocative, opinionated presenters and interviewees. Fox News in the United States is the obvious model. In a country with much larger audiences, it is spectacularly profitable. It provides some news, but many more views – mostly right-wing ones.
There has so far been no British television equivalent, though GB News sources suggest their new channel could bear some resemblance to radio stations such as LBC and Talk Radio, where there is endless chatter, dispute and disagreement.
The question is whether GB News can square what it wants to do with Britain’s broadcasting impartiality rules, which are policed by media regulator Ofcom. Its founders evidently think it can, and say they have secured the necessary broadcasting licences. But it will clearly have a tricky line to tread between Ofcom’s insistence on overall neutrality and the new channel’s apparent intention to appeal to a largely right-of-centre audience.
On the one hand, Mr Neil is quoted as saying that GB News ‘is aimed at a vast number of people who feel underserved and unheard by their media’. This sounds like a dig at the BBC, from which Mr Neil has resigned to undertake his new role. On the other hand, sources insist that although the channel will have something in common with the format of Fox News, it won’t share its unremittingly right-wing views. Nor would it be allowed to, under Ofcom’s existing regulations.
It’s true that Mr Neil’s political views have mellowed over the years, and he is no longer the red-in-tooth-and-claw man of the Right that he once was. But he is still right-of-centre, though as an interviewer commendably fair, and as hard on Tory politicians as on Labour ones. Still, it doesn’t sound as though GB News as a whole will consist of balanced interviews.
I suppose the channel’s founders think that, with a Tory government in power and an anti-bbc cabal led by Dominic Cummings in Number 10, there could be no better time to push against impartiality rules. And I imagine they will have been bucked by the rumours (unconfirmed as I write) that the new chairman of Ofcom will be ex- Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, a lifelong champion of greater plurality in the broadcast media.
Will GB News succeed? I’m pretty sure that the amount of money it is raising (said to be between £45 and £55 million) won’t be enough. But if audience figures are moving upwards, it won’t have any difficulty in raising more cash from investors such as Discovery. Impartiality rules could be a problem, but probably not an insurmountable one – even though the Left can be counted on to create a stink over the issue.
Perhaps the best reason for thinking it could flourish is the presence of Andrew Neil. In the autumn of his career, with solid achievements behind him, he won’t want to be associated with a disaster.
That said, new media launches seldom run smoothly. Success, if it comes, is bound to be a struggle.
Spare a kind thought for Emily Sheffield, who replaced George Osborne as editor of the giveaway London Evening Standard in June.
Some believed that the former Chancellor’s departure after three years at the helm denoted failure. Surely only in the sense that a man running out of a burning building may be considered to have failed.
The Standard distributed 514,040 copies in August, a decline of 37 per cent over 12 months. With fewer commuters because of COVID-19, there are fewer readers. Advertising had already plummeted before the pandemic struck, and in 2019 the paper reported losses of £11.36 million. Ms Sheffield’s editorial budget has been slashed. The paper looks lamentably thin.
I hope it has a future. There are online aspirations. But I doubt its shareholders, led by Evgeny Lebedev, can sustain mounting losses for long. Was there something slightly caddish about Mr Osborne’s escaping when he did?