Will GB News – the new television channel launching today – provide the antidote to the BBC’s woke propaganda, as its founders contend? Or will it prove, as some critics fear, the final Americanisation of UK news, emboldening the reactionary right? Or both? And will anyone watch it? Around 6,500 hours a year of “original news, opinion and debate” are planned: programmes range from a primetime news and interview programme with GB News and Spectator chair Andrew Neil, called Andrew Neil, to cultural commentator Andrew Doyle’s Free Speech Nation, “a fearless filleting of the country’s thorniest debates.”
On paper, GB News is an anachronism. It’s anchor-driven television, available for free, funded by ads. It’s hard not to question this model’s commercial prospects, particularly when it is compared to News UK TV, which was a new, Murdoch-owned rolling news service that was canned earlier this year. It looked, in lots of ways, less ambitious than GB News. It would have benefited from News UK’s existing resources: its journalists, its general infrastructure and its…
