GB News isn’t aimed at people on the Left like me — but I wish it were less shoddy 

It was clear from the first announcement of the channel that GB News was never going to be aimed at me. So when TheArticle asked me to write about it, I thought about how best to approach it. I want to be fair and balanced to a project that I consider to have a biased slant, looking at it respectfully as the latest entry into the broadcast news canon. 

So having felt that GB News isn’t for me, I tried to think about who it was for, and what they might think of it. GB News is largely for people who agree with Andrew Neil’s opening monologue, that other news outlets were too infected by “wokeness” to cover the issues they cared about or to put their side of the debate. 

I think this is demonstrably untrue. One only has to look at the recent debate over the England football team taking the knee to see that it has been widely discussed with viewpoints for and against on all mainstream news channels and programmes. Last night I watched Dan Wootton discuss it with guests. The main difference from the BBC and other channels was that Wootton, the presenter, took a clear stance against the action, calling it divisive. 

“Divisive” is a clever import to Right-wing politics — interestingly, taken from the PC Left. It is very difficult to argue with. If you say “I don’t think taking the knee is divisive”, there you are demonstrating division. It’s a way of deflecting argument rather than having one openly and honestly. The truth is, taking the knee is only divisive because some people have taken against it and talk up its divisiveness. If they had, instead, ignored the bit of the football they didn’t like, it would have passed without much comment. 

But the intended audience for GB News feel that they are already asked to ignore too much. They have been primed for this channel (and the Right’s larger culture war strategy, of which this channel is a part) by five years of being told they are being ignored by “THEM”. THEM being cultural and liberal elites, who apparently run everything (these are people who put the architects of the Bedroom Tax, Cameron and Osborne, as among those wet liberals) and have long been ignoring them and sneering at their opinions and interests. 

This sense of being ignored and belittled isn’t wholly without merit, as has been endlessly discussed (usually in handwringing debates by those very same metropolitan liberals). But I am, as yet, wholly unconvinced that GB News is the answer. 

In part, this is because GB News is making the same mistakes as the rest of the British Left and Right, by trying to import wholesale the US culture wars, rather than thinking consciously about what is unique to Britain and where US slogans and the backlash against them makes less sense and should be adapted to context. 

But mostly, I think GB News will fail because, as it stands, it is insulting an audience already primed to be offended. That could indeed be deadly. 

You could have written off the technical glitches of the first night as teething problems. But that they are still happening days later shows that there has been a significant lack of either thought, investment or both in the technical side of the channel. The whole thing looks and feels shabby. You can’t even hear the guests a lot of the time. 

The sets, too, seem to have been hurriedly knocked off in a spirit of “will this do?”. Andrew Neil’s, in particular, is very odd. You know how dentists always have super cheery offices to try to take your mind off the pain of what is about to happen? Well, Neil’s is the exact opposite of that. It looks like the waiting room of a sauna that hates you. 

Why would an audience who already feel that they are being insulted accept this kind of shoddy offering as their due? I think the lack of care and attention to quality that is currently being displayed, not so much in the editorial, but in crucial technical aspects of GB News may be the death of it. It is insulting the very audience it is trying to cultivate, making them feel that they weren’t actually worth the effort of a professionally delivered product. 

I am not the core audience for GB News. But I also don’t feel that the arguments I do agree with thrive without challenge. It is only through strong challenge that you can sharpen how you fight for what you believe in. At the moment, GB News is a very blunt tool indeed. And that’s a shame – both for those who believe in its mission and those who want to fight a stronger opponent. 

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