GB News Launches on Social Media

They look like car stickers, especially the black one.

And the BBC.

Not quite, citizens of the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' (and one or two other territories) share the 'British' demonym - it doesn't solely relate to the larger of the two islands in the British Isles.

Team GB ignore NI though!

Maybe a bit off-topic but was watching the Murdoch Dynasty BBC2 show recently and it had a snippet of a Robert Peston report and it was noticable how different he sounded. While hes always had his slightly eccentric delivery style the snippet of that report they showed sounded fairly normal in comparison to recent years where on ITV his delivery is very sing-song and you almost feel he's exaggerating the delivery.

This is what Preston said in 2014:
The misapprehension about yourself you wish you could erase…
That the way I speak on the BBC is how I speak all the time. My voice comes out stilted when I'm broadcasting. I can't explain it – something happens that makes me sound weird. But I'm not complaining because people recognise me and Rory Bremner does impressions of me.

Let's be honest about the Northern Irish stuff - they chose the name because it sounded better and would be better legally than 'UK News' (due to News UK). I'm not sure if anyone was being serious about them not including Northern Ireland but I severely doubt that's the reason they chose the name.

Fun fact of the day: the US state of Hawaii is not in North America but, rather, Oceania.

The evidence we have actually does not suggest anything to the contrary, they are following the early-to-mid 2000s Fox News playbook to the letter right now. That gives me a lot of cause for concern.

The fact that Fox News was aired in this country for years, under regulatory environments that were arguably a little bit stricter than we have now, doesn't give me any confidence that GBN is going to be anything other a poor Fox News clone.

And there have been those before. In other countries, granted, but they've not all been successful. For every Sky News Australia, there's a Sun News Network. Not every attempt at right wing news has taken off and this could go either way.

Personally, I don't mind news with a right wing slant, as long as it is actual news, and not just material made up to push a particular editorial agenda. The sad fact though currently is that most of what is currently thought of as right wing news is not news, but propaganda, with little to no factual basis at all, and that needs to change.

I'd like to see a genuine right wing news channel reporting actual news, and if GBN does that, then I can watch it and not feel bad about it. Given the current model of right wing news worldwide though, I have little evidence to base that hope upon.

I wonder how long the GB News management and funding team will give the channel before they judge if it is successful or a failure?

Will they allow the channel to develop slowly over a year or so, or do they want results quick and fast before they judge whether the channel continues?

ITN News Channel launched in 2000, and ITN (ITV News) gave it five years before they gave up on it and closed the news channel just before Christmas 2005.

News channels sometimes operate as loss-leaders to increase brand prestige (not relevant here) and to aid in political influence and lobbying. It might be the case here that success isn't determined by quick results or financial return.

ITN were a news media business though in the traditional sense, operating to provide a service and make a profit. There are other motivations at play for some of GB News backers. If it doesn't go well I could see Discovery backing out very early on but others seeing value (not in a monetary sense) in keeping it going. If it does go well it might be the opposite and Discovery buys it out completely.


I suspect as others have said this will actually probably be quite a dry operation for the bulk of the day with a fairly basic news service during the day. And then at night they'll be one or two provocative things said, hopefully by the guests rather than the hosts, which get the attention of social media and skew the opinion of the channel.

The FNC formula that Murdoch devloped over the decades is to make their viewers angry and whip them up in a frenzy. Tell them they are the minority and their former way of life (usually a fantasy world from a bygone era, like the 1950s-1960s) is under threat, other-ize everyone else and demonize the other media outlets as liars and cheats and watch viewership soar. Scared people will watch in droves.