Here is Henry Hill’s assessment of the state of play at GB News, written last summer on roughly the second anniversary of the channel going live –
“After a rushed and amateurish launch, the most plausible scenario seemed to be that News UK, backed by the financial might of Rupert Murdoch and the media machine which built Fox News, would learn what lessons it could and then eat GB News for breakfast.
Suffice to say, that didn’t happen. Whilst there has been a lot of churn, both in what’s broadcast and behind the scenes, GB News has remained comfortably ahead of its putative rival.
Nor has the channel gone completely down the “all blowhards, all the time” wormhole predicted by Matt Deegan. There have been departures from its original line-up, and Nigel Farage did get his own show. But ex-Labour MP Gloria de Piero is still there, Michael Portillo now hosts a Sunday programme, Eamonn Holmes anchors the breakfast line-up, and so on.”
Since then, Dan Wooton and Calvin Robinson have left – Mark Steyn has already gone – and Camilla Tominey has joined her ex-Telegraph colleague Christopher Hope.
In short, GB News, in political terms, has settled somewhere to the left of Reform UK (Richard Tice is a presenter) but well to the right of, say, the Conservative Parliamentary Party’s centre of gravity.
That’s where a lot of our readers are, not to mention our panel of Tory members. So perhaps it’s no surprise that over half of them now watch the channel.
So GB News will help to shape their view, first, of the Conservatives as the general election looms into view; second, of Reform UK; third and more specifically, of Nigel Farage, who has turned into the channel’s star presenter; fourth, of post-election Tory debate and, therefore, of any leadership election, assuming that there is one in the event of the Party going into opposition…
…And, fifth, of this year’s presidential election in America. One estimate of Donald Trump’s popularity rating in the UK is 18 per cent. How does it stand among viewers of GB News? How will the channel cover the election? – especially if it and our own coincide? What impact if any will voters’ take on Trump have on their take on one his most vocal supporters in Britain – Farage?