The Telegraph’s Robin Aitken goes to bat for GB News, the emerging U.K. media outlet battling criticism, advertiser boycotts and regulatory scrutiny as it challenges the prevailing liberal-Left dominance in broadcasting. Here’s an excerpt:
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. …
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%. 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. …
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 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. …
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.
Aitken concludes that amidst GB News’s struggle for prominence in the U.K. media, Ofcom’s commitment to free speech will be crucial for the station’s survival.
Worth reading in full.
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