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Neil himself will introduce a regular “ Woke Watch” bit, and the comedian Andrew Doyle will host a weekend show called Free Speech Nation. One late-night show will have a segment called “Uncancelled,” speaking with those who have been silenced by Britain’s allegedly suffocating left-wing consensus. The opening night made clear that “wokeness,” that nebulous bugbear, is firmly in its presenters’ sights.
(Neil does his bit by keeping a house in rural France.) Just as Fox commentators railed against the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a recent morning show on GB News criticized English soccer players for kneeling to protest racial injustice. In his opening monologue, Neil said that GB News would not be “an echo chamber for the metropolitan mindset” the channel is proud of its 13 regional reporters. Opposition to fashionable liberal values-or sometimes a caricature of them-is therefore central to the new outlet’s appeal. Unsurprisingly, older Britons support continued strong government spending-specifically in the form of their state pensions, which rise in line with inflation. On culture, this group leans right, but on economics, the picture is more complicated. Many of them are also well-off, with household wealth swelled by decades of rising home prices. It should therefore do particularly well among Britons older than 65, who are much less likely than their younger counterparts to have a college degree, are much more conservative, and are much more likely to have voted for Brexit.
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In their analysis, the BBC is too London-based, too full of college graduates, and too biased toward the “Remain” side of the EU referendum-in other words, dominated by what Americans might call “latte liberals” or the “coastal elite.” GB News will provide the antidote. Leading figures at GB News, including its CEO, the former Sky News Australia boss Angelos Frangopoulos, reject the Fox comparison, but they clearly believe there is a gap in Britain’s television market. (During the 2016 referendum campaign, those who expressed fears about the effects of leaving the European Union were regularly accused of “ talking Britain down.”) It also echoes the rhetoric of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose favored method of deflecting criticism is to ramble vaguely about the country’s greatness.
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The clue is in the name … We will not come at every story with the conviction that Britain is always at fault.” To British ears, this is code for backing Brexit. (Never mind, of course, that GB News is itself part of the mainstream media.) “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda,” Neil said in the monologue that opened the programming on Sunday. The shift is real.Įarly shows suggest that GB News will be the channel for the “you can’t say anything anymore” crowd-a venue where hosts regularly imply that their viewers are getting the real story that’s been kept from them by the mainstream media. Whatever else it is, GB News is a right-wing television-news channel. Although Britain’s broadcasting laws-which require news channels to be impartial-will place some limits on what GB News can do, its creators clearly believe that U.S.-style grievance politics can sustain at least a low-budget, tactically neutered version of Fox.
GB News has been hyped as a major shift in British television, away from its tradition of staid objectivity and toward the American climate of passionate, hyper-partisan anchors and highly opinionated programming. Silence reigned.įor GB News’s target audience, its scrappy, homespun nature might be part of its charm-proof that this is a plucky upstart taking on Britain’s state broadcaster, the BBC, and the long-established Sky News. When the channel’s lead anchor, Andrew Neil, concluded an interview with the Scottish historian Neil Oliver, he said that he hoped to see Oliver again, “and I promise next time we’ll get you a better microphone.” The next day, an afternoon host, Gloria De Piero, encouraged the channel’s regional reporters, standing at attention in four little onscreen boxes, to say how happy they were that the channel had launched. By contrast, when GB News went on the air Sunday night, it looked as though it had been filmed in an abandoned strip club-all dark walls and neon lights-and suffered from poorly synchronized sound. They were right in one way: Fox is a slick product with fancy studios and whizzy graphics. In the months leading up to the launch of Great Britain’s newest television channel, GB News, its backers insisted that it wouldn’t be a British version of Fox News.