GB News

Rajar, the radio industry method of ratings has been cancelled since March, although I believe they're back getting people to tick diaries again?

Plus Times Radio is commercial free, so no need to subscribe to Rajar, not that I think their numbers will be big.

I’ve no idea if they’re planning to subscribe to Rajar, but I believe the Times Radio model is built on the premise that it ‘adds value’ for Times online subscribers. Quite how they can say this, when you listen free on DAB, I’m not sure, but that’s the concept anyway! Monocle Radio does the same - a free radio station designed to entice people to ultimately subscribe to the website and magazine.

Re Talk Radio - its most recent audience numbers were around 430k. LBC isn’t far off the 3m mark. Talk Radio will be a great example for anyone at GB News mulling which direction to take. The radio station was trundling along with no real purpose and finally found an audience by becoming a home for - frankly - the oddballs and anti vaxxers. The problem with this strategy is that it can’t last. In a few years’ time when Covid is a distant memory, they’ll be forced to double down and become even more hysterical to hold on to listeners, or they’ll need to shift dramatically back to an a-typical talk format.

Ultimately, this is not the US. (Plus we’ve seen now what happens in the US with populism!) Canada and Australia have both attempted the right wing media route. It was a total disaster in Canada and has turned Sky News Aus into a bit of a laughing stock channel.

I wish the founders all the best. They’ll need it!!

PS - it cracks me up to hear Andrew Neil attempting to appear to be some kind of anti establishment man of the people. Made his name running The Scotsman (a paper so achingly establishment Edinburgh it hurts) then ran a billionaires plaything media operation and spent his senior years taking money from and hosting shows on a channel he claims to hate!! You’ve got to hand it to him for his chutzpah! I wonder if his show coming from his home in France counts as ‘non London centric’ 😂

Investors apparently want to make clear they're not 'right of centre'...

Legatum Group has asked us to point out the think-tank they sponsor, the Legatum Institute, is not right of centre - contrary to the headline on this Press Gazette story which has now been changed https://t.co/4BUeItVYwW

— Press Gazette (@pressgazette) January 7, 2021

It's donor list and senior personnel suggest otherwise.

I can very much see the concerns some have about GB News and its likely leanings/programming style.

That said I do think existing media may something to answer for and given some pundits a platform their contributions don't deserve. There are your fair share of 'shock jock'/'partisan talking heads'/'professional pundits' who channels must know add little insight to any discourse but are constantly wheeled out time and again by broadcasters - the likes of Isabel Oakeshott, Tom Harwood, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Claire Fox, Toby Young, Ash Sakhar, Owen Jones, Brendan O'Neill etc.

I get that channels need to fill their time and one of the easiest ways to do it is by having two guests on to 'debate' and these individuals get reaction and clicks but giving these sorts of personalities such a consistent platform leads to the sort of partisan atmosphere there is in politics these days. The existing news channels could and should be doing better.

it's a dog-whistle so loud that half of Battersea's started howling.

If you wanted to help inform the forgotten and underserved, the first place you'd actually start would be in local news, which is hollowed out in many parts (and effectively doesn't exist in some areas, though maybe not the areas that GB News want to aim at), and try to help people become better informed about what's close to them. That'd be an even bigger money pit, of course, and has been cocked-up badly in TV already...

I guess there is an audience for "the news the woke establishment doesn't want you to see!", but are there really enough of them out there for GB News to make a profit? All stairlift and charity ads? Feels like it could be a lot of people who should know better stirring up nonsense on the streets of northern cities via GB News-branded social media (rather than the broadcast channel), from the safety of London*.

(edit)* while damning London as a crime-ridden hellhole that takes all your money, of course.

Absolutely. The standard broadcast media have been utterly complicit in bigging up those unrepresentative, politically extreme 'pundits'. There seems to be an idea among TV producers that getting somebody from the hard-left and somebody from the hard-right is balance, despite the fact that the bell curve and all available data shows that their positions are outliers and the majority of the electorate are somewhere nearer the middle.

I suppose that part of it is predictability. All of those people you mention are completely predictable in their output - O'Neill to the point that his repetitiveness and predictable contrarianism has actually become a meme. If you are producing a TV debate show that has to give the appearance of balance, you want to know what is being said beforehand so you can have somebody else to contradict it. You don't want a bunch of sensible, intelligent people on who look at the evidence because there is a risk that they all might come to the same conclusion - then the evidence-free nutters will start whinging about a lack of balance. It's basically political programming by numbers.

And then you have the entertainment value - which is particularly clear on programmes like Question Time. They want ridiculous, extreme answers because that creates traction on social media. In fact, the broadcasters (unlike the one-sided newspapers) get to have it both ways as they get both the supporters and the opponents furiously responding to every clip.

I fully expect the usual crowd to be frequent appearers on GB News. I'm sure that many of the right-wingers will be presenters/regulars and the Corbynite outriders will be popping up to give the illusion of balance and to provide useful strawmen for their presenters to attack.

Hear hear! Two fantastic posts from people who know what they are talking about. I couldn't have compiled a better list of extremist pundits who bring absolutely nothing to any debate apart from their apparent desire to want to create moments that could go viral. I have noticed that for the most part that the BBC have done their best to stay clear from the likes of Jones, Harwood or certainly that appears to be the case in recent months. I for one cannot stomach listening to some of the tripe that spews from many of those mentioned.

Do we know where GB News is going to be technically produced?

The News UK building I think, aka the 'mini Shard', next door to the big Shard?

Unlikely as News UK have their own rival channel to launch as well.