Demonising Andrew Neil won’t stop GBNews — but the market might 

Launching a new commercial mass-media organisation in the UK is always a challenge. GBNews, the UK’s first mainstream news channel in a decade, is about to face such a challenge. There are precedents in the media to suggest possible outcomes. These are not necessarily all hopeful.

GBNews came into existence because there was a perceived gap in the market. The editorial consensus of the existing mainstream news channels, Sky and BBC, and the news output of Channel 4, seem insufficiently inclusive or balanced. The results of the 2016 EU referendum and the 2019 General Election indicated that a large section of viewers feel disconnected from the slant of the news they are receiving. An example of this has to be the news organisations’ supine attitude to left-wing political commentators espousing extreme opinions in live broadcasts.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and his surprise election result in 2017 were regarded by our broadcasters as giving communism a form of legitimacy unseen since the Second World War. While communist-inspired economics have had consistently terrible outcomes, the closest any left-wing commentator has experienced to reasoned challenge was when Kate Andrews, then of the IEA, tried to force Owen Jones to acknowledge that the ongoing collapse of human civilisation in Venezuela was due to that country’s leadership’s implementation of socialist policies. Other than that, communists and their outdated and dangerous opinions have been treated with undeserved reverence by broadcasters who clearly do not remember the USSR.

However, these news organisations’ reaction to Brexit was probably the trigger for the launch of GBNews. It was not even one hour after David Dimbleby had announced at about 4:40 am on 24 June 2016 that the UK had voted to leave the EU that Emily Maitlis was talking up a second referendum and pretending that this idea had been prevalent throughout the campaign, strangely describing a fresh poll as a “phantom figure”. The BBC did not stop appearing to try undermining Brexit until after the 2019 General Election, three-and-a-half years later.

This disconnection from the public recalls a previous instance. When Freddie Mercury died of Aids in 1991, there was saturation coverage of his passing, including a BBC1 special replacing existing programming. Bohemian Rhapsody re-entered the charts after 16 years and again got to No.1. However, there was a sizeable and bemused segment of the population who said “Who?”. Richard Ingrams realised that mass culture was missing out a lot of people. He started The Oldie, targeted at a readership that had abandoned Top of the Pops before the 1970s. The UK magazine industry has seen a dramatic decline in the internet age. Numerous genres and previously popular titles disappeared from shop shelves. The Oldie has thrived.

There are also examples of publishing failures to fill a perceived gap. In the late 1970s, the businessman Sir James Goldsmith observed that Britain did not have a weekly news magazine like Time and Newsweek in the USA, L’Express in France, or Der Speigel in Germany. He tried to redress this with a publication called NOW!.

It was also allegedly designed to take advantage of a gap in serious news publishing caused by the closure of The Times and The Sunday Times, a closure which eventually turned out to be temporary.

Goldsmith was wrong. The Economist already had this weekly market. The demise of the magazine was assisted by the chorus of hostility and ridicule it received from other media outlets. Private Eye led the charge , as well as publishing newsroom gossip, but the rest of the media joined in. When the BBC published a tie-in book for its weekly satirical show Not The Nine O’Clock News, it was called NOT! and featured a parody of the magazine cover .

Starting a television station with a new concept is much riskier than starting a magazine. Considering the slant Channel 4 News gives to its broadcasts, which is an extreme version of that on the BBC and Sky News channels, the approach of GBNews will be novel for its difference. Novelty is also what TV-am tried when it launched in the early 1980s to fill then-vacant morning TV schedules. On paper, TV-am had a lot to offer. The “superstars” of news broadcasting were slated to appear: names such as David Frost, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon, Michael Parkinson, and Robert Kee.

It was a disaster, too ponderous with its “mission to explain” to entice serious listeners away from the back-and-forth of John Timpson and Brian Redhead on Radio 4’s Today, and not frivolous enough to attract viewers from BBC1’s sofas-and-sweaters spoiler Breakfast Time. David Frost’s monologues to camera were not an aid to the audience figures. Eventually the ailing channel was saved when the original team was sacked. New faces, such as Roland Rat, appeared in front of the camera, leading to a tenfold audience increase.

So what will happen to GBNews? It cannot help but be distinct. ITV has all but disappeared as a news provider, and this shows the risk. Television has been losing market share to the internet for decades now, and ITV’s and its news output’s decline is due to falling advertising, as firms feel obliged to divert some of their advertising spend to YouTube and social media. The time when commercial television, as a monopoly supplier of television advertising, almost literally had a government-provided licence to print money, is over.

GBNews also faces risks other than advertising income shortfall. It is probable there will be a uncoordinated but focused campaign of attack against the channel. Andrew Neil, the chairman of GBNews, is as much a part of Private Eye‘s demonology as, before his death, Sir James Goldsmith used to be. So Private Eye may pull out all the stops. The pressure group “Stop Funding Hate” seems set to threaten boycotts against any firm that advertises on the channel. The Guardian, being the newspaper of choice of media professionals, may also publish hostile articles. Ofcom could be inundated with frivolous complaints from online activists who regard monitoring the channel for perceived infractions as life-fulfilling.

The new channel needs funding from advertisers to survive, and it needs viewers for those advertisements. Such viewers are a finite resource. We are probably about to witness the televisual version of a circulation war, made even more unpleasant by press hostility and left-wing activism. Andrew Neil is, however, an experienced broadcaster. He was instrumental in seeing Sky TV thrive after being launched under an immense mountain of debt. Neil also saw off left-wing extremism when he was a leading part of News International’s move to Wapping in 1986, thwarting corrupt trades unionists who were blocking necessary modernisation.

Starting a television channel in an era of multichannel broadcasting and multiplatform streaming is very risky. The business model has to be a precise fit. It remains to be seen if Mr Neil has found this and if he can weather the inevitable storm from the usual suspects.

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