GB News: free speech champions or media manipulators?

The channel is continually under fire for unacknowledged bias, while its stars say they offer voices beyond the "mainstream media", but who is right?

Michael Crick, the sometimes bumptious but always effective journalist and author, was on a tear last night. He was a guest on GB News, appearing on the increasingly unmoored Neil Oliver’s show to discuss media censorship, and Oliver was peddling his usual corrosive, hunched thesis that there is an overarching “establishment” which controls the channels of information and systematically seeks to manipulate the public in a dizzying number of directions. I try to ration my viewing of Oliver: what was offbeat and questioning has become wild-eyed, paranoid and incoherent, and I’ve gone through amusement and anger, now reaching weary resignation and a touch of concern. I mean that; he doesn’t seem wholly well.

Sometimes my self-restraint gives way. Oliver had been raving about the secrecy of the legislative process recently, and had either ignorantly or wilfully misrepresented the normal procedures of passing laws, and I gave into temptation and put up as concise-but-comprehensive a refutation as I could. Oliver was a decent television presenter, and his windswept “Do you like Runrig too?” demeanour of long hair and leather jacket found an audience on the BBC’s Coast, A History of Scotland and elsewhere. He was even president of the National Trust for Scotland for a while, placing one foot firmly in the establishment. But I don’t think he’s an especially clever man, and his conspiracy ramblings, while having a superficially plausible façade, are relatively easy to deconstruct. The joins are visible.

Crick was not in a mood to hold his tongue. He has form here: in September, he was a guest on Michelle Dewberry’s show and the pair found themselves in a snappy row about Brexit and the role of Ofcom which resulted in Dewberry telling him “You might be able to make these snide comments in other places, but you don’t make them on my watch I’m afraid”, before threatening to throw him off the show

I will be absolutely clear because I am not having this, and I am being told to move on… don’t be patronising to me, Michael, because I will kick you off my show… I will tell you that for free.

One can have a sliver of sympathy for Dewberry: because he is clever and informed and dogged, Crick can undoubtedly be confrontational and superior, but her visible irritation just acted to demonstrate that he’d hit a nerve.

With Oliver, he was unabashed.

I’ve been fighting bias in television for a very long time and it’s one of the reasons I left Channel 4 News, because I thought it was left-wing biased, and I think Ofcom, who are one of the weakest institutions on the planet, should get a grip on you lot.

His smile becoming rictus, Oliver asserted that GB News had made space for voices from across the political spectrum, especially those not usually heard on the “mainstream media” (there is sometimes a reason for this), but Crick would have none if it.

I mean, it’s absurd that you have Tory MP after Tory MP after Tory MP, two leaders of the Brexit Party and hardly any Labour MPs; you are a right-wing channel and the rules in this country are very clear.

Perhaps inevitably, Oliver decided to pull the plug, granting Crick the priceless media coup of martyrdom.

The accusations are hard to refute. It is a situation which only two years ago would have seemed absolutely inconceivable, but GB News includes in its roster of presenters five sitting or recent Conservative MPs, including the current deputy chairman of the party and a former prime minister; a former leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and first minister of Northern Ireland; two former leaders of the Brexit Party; and the more distantly Conservative Michael Portillo, still a one-time MP, cabinet minister and leadership contender. As a “counterweight”, they also employ Gloria De Piero, former Labour MP for Ashfield and shadow cabinet member under Jeremy Corbyn, but she has hosted a Sunday evening interview slot with little opportunity to editorialise.

All of this makes the idea that GB News is not a right-wing channel a difficult one to sustain. Remember too that it has only just parted company with Laurence Fox, founder and leader of the populist Reclaim Party, under whose banner he stood in the 2021 London mayoral election (with the backing of Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party and led by GB News’s very own Richard Tice, and of the toadlike populist guru Nigel Farage), and the chilly, sinister Calvin Robinson, a deacon in the tiny evangelical, conservative Free Church of England. For confirmation, however, if you can bear it, watch GB News for half an hour. Whatever view you take of its format and its “talent”, it is impossible to think the station is not leaning broadly to the Right.

As a Conservative, perhaps I would be expected to like and support the channel. I don’t. For one thing, I find it slow-thinking, clichéd, often poorly informed and distinctly bargain-basement, and enveloped in an air of righteous self-regard, as if it had some intellectual iconoclastic or counter-cultural value. What I find much harder to overlook, however, is that it needn’t have been this way; indeed, we were assured it would not be. When the concept of GB News was launched in the autumn of 2020, its chairman was Andrew Neil, a broadcaster for whom I have enormous regard. He has his critics but he is intelligent, savvy, experienced and fearless, and still probably the best cross-examiner in the business. As well as being chairman, Neil would host a prime-time evening show.

The channel was intended to appeal to an audience which felt unengaged by existing media platforms, and Neil promised it would “champion robust, balanced debate and a range of perspectives on the issues that affect everyone in the UK, not just those living in the London area”. Perhaps it was naïveté, but I know from friends in television that there was a genuine feeling that the channel might do something differently, provide a real alternative to the traditional model of news followed by the BBC, ITN and Sky. The depths of GB News’s resources were questioned, but if anything this engendered a kind of plucky underdog spirit. Again and again, we were reassured that it would not be a British version of the conservative opinion channel Fox News. It promised to shun the incestuous intra-media relationships to which news coverage so easily falls prey, and to address the overlooked, everyday issues which affected people’s ordinary lives.

We all know that didn’t last. Neil, who now freely admits he made a catastrophic mistake in joining the organisation, lasted two weeks on air, hosting just eight episodes of his flagship programme, before going on an extended holiday to engage in a bitter contract battle with GB News. He resigned in September 2021 and did not appear on the channel again. Helen Lewis painted a mordantly witty portrait of the GB News launch for The Atlantic that summer, which is well worth reading.

So I feel annoyed and slightly let down that what could have been a disruptive innovation in British TV was a wasted opportunity, and is instead a dreary succession of right-leaning populist I-reckon merchants whose conversation you would dread in a quiet pub. I am aware I have the ultimate sanction of simply never watching it, and I rarely do, though as someone who comments on politics for a living, I do try to keep an awareness of what is going on in their corner of Paddington basin. It is not unremittingly grim: De Piero is a skilful and sympathetic interviewer who has drawn some fascinating insights from her guests; Camilla Tominey, who helms the Sunday morning show, is a direct, unaffected journalist with good instincts; and I have an affection for Arlene Foster—Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee DBE, I should say—who has demonstrated unexpected warmth and pragmatism since she stepped away from the grim-faced clutches of the DUP (imagine being regarded as dangerously idolatrous and sybaritic because you are a communicant member of the Church of Ireland!).

I cannot deny that GB News has attracted an audience to an extent many doubted it would. The BBC remains comfortably dominant, but by this summer GB News was reaching nearly 3.5 million viewers a month. Insiders admit that they are deserted for the bigger broadcasters when there is a hard news event to follow, but the channel’s content is neatly packaged into YouTube-friendly clips and, as a recent article in The Economist warned, the real battle here may be for political influence on the right of the spectrum. Perhaps the BBC and Sky News are not its real competitors.

This brings me to what I think is the much more interesting question than whether GB News is biased and right-wing: plainly it is. The issue is whether it is a news channel at all, or whether it is an opinion platform of a kind the UK media has not really had before; and, if it is, what the implications of that are for regulation and for the wider political sphere. As The Economist noted, GB News’s CEO, Angelos Frangopolous, “has shown that Britain’s historic style of television news is more a product of journalistic culture and sense of duty than law”. Michael Crick may have been dismissive of the media regulator Ofcom, which is a pretty milquetoast organisation as regulators go, but it has opened several inquiries into the channel: it may be indicative that GB News has been found in breach of its licence five times so far, four of those deemed “significant”, but on no occasion has Ofcom issued a fine, required an on-air clarification or imposed any other sanction.

You might almost imagine Ofcom is run by a GB News fifth column. Even before the channel launched in June 2021, Adam Baxter, Ofcom’s director of standards and audience participation, acknowledged GB News was “seeking to come from a right-of-centre perspective and there’s nothing in the code that prohibits a broadcaster coming from a particular perspective”. While it has essentially excused breaches of the channel’s broadcasting licence, the organisation’s chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph in July in which she defended to role of “alternative views” but insisted that they had to follow strict rules.

Dame Melanie argued that the restrictions of “due impartiality” were often misinterpreted.

A common misconception is that due impartiality means “neutrality”. Or that it’s a mathematical construct whereby equal airtime must be given to all sides of a debate. Not so. That small word ‘due’ is extremely important. It means ‘adequate or appropriate to the subject and nature of the programme’. So when we apply our rules we take account of context, including the nature of the subject, the type of programme and channel, and the likely expectation of the audience.

On the issue of politicians presenting programmes, a matter directly relevant to GB News (though of course Nadine Dorries hosts her own show on Talk TV), the Ofcom head said that, without “exceptional editorial justification”, an active politician could not act as a newsreader or interviewer for a news programme. However, she set that regulation within a broader context.

Outside of news programmes—such as current affairs formats which typically feature more in-depth discussion, analysis, interviews and long-form video reports—there’s no Ofcom rule that prevents a serving politician or political candidate from hosting—provided they aren’t standing for election.

This was essentially drafting GB News’s defence for them. Dame Melanie acknowledged public concern and announced that Ofcom would carry out research on the attitude of the public to frontline politicians acting as TV presenters, though GB News, savvily, quickly commissioned their own polling to show that the public was, surprise surprise, in favour of the channel’s model, and clothed the findings in the raiment of freedom of speech. We await Ofcom’s research with interest.

Essentially, GB News used the notion of a traditional news channel to launch in a category of one: an opinion-orientated news channel. While we were familiar with US equivalents, the idea had not been tried in the UK (though Rupert Murdoch’s Talk TV was not far behind GB News, launching after several false starts in April 2022). We cannot wholly blame GB News for this; although they failed to deliver on their dynamic, disruptive promise, the channel’s owners used the opportunities and licensing arrangements which were in place. There seems to have been little serious discussion about whether the regulatory and, indeed, cultural landscape was adequate, and, underlying that, an assumption that all would be well in the end.

There was the faintest song of an unlikely canary in the mineshaft. On 27 May 2021, the House of Lords debated a report from the Communications and Digital Committee entitled Public service broadcasting: as vital as ever. (It was a little behind schedule, as the report had been published in November 2019, but it is fair to say quite a lot happened in the intervening months.) It was a rather somnolent and self-satisfied debate, with some contributions of grotesque smugness, but one peer identified the issue which we’re now facing writ much larger.

Baroness Fox of Buckley, an unpredictable figure who has travelled from the Revolutionary Communist Party to sitting as a Brexit Party MEP, argued that the challenge for public service broadcasters from streaming services “could identify the wrong problem, and it ignores the elephant in the room”. This was less than three weeks before GB News’s scheduled launch. She explained:

There is a much more profound identity crisis, and I am glad that the Government’s public service broadcasting advisory panel has tried to dig a bit deeper and ask whether, as has already been mentioned, the concept of public service is needed and, if so, what a modern PSB should look like… what is to say that GB News is not a new kind of public service broadcasting? We should at least allow it to shake up any complacency.

With the exception of a passing mention at Business Questions in the House of Commons the previous November, the debate in the Lords was the first time GB News had been mentioned by name in Parliament. It is easy to be wise after the event, but if there was such concern—and there was—that the newcomer would be a British version of Fox News, might it not have been wise to broaden the discussion from liking or disliking the editorial politics of GB News to the format and content which news outlets could and should offer?

We are where we are. But the current situation, in which we are trying to flex the existing Ofcom regulatory framework to take in a format which doesn’t wholly fit, is not satisfactory. If anything, it provides GB News with a shield: there is enough leeway for them to favour a political stance heavily, but the obligations of their licence are just enough for them to say that they are protecting free speech as well as extending a platform to those who don’t have a voice elsewhere. Yet still they can present themselves as distinct from the “mainstream media'“, which reinforces and yet is reinforced by more provocative, outlandish content. The inaction of the political community as a whole has almost created GB News’s perfect storm.

Where do we go from here? While I understand his visceral frustration, I don’t follow Michael Crick’s belief that GB News should be closed down. Censorship should be well on the way to the last resort, and the sweeping kind of censorship which closing down an entire channel represents should be even more a measure of desperation. Let us be clear-sighted about what we want to achieve. My instinct would be that we want the most open and pluralistic media landscape possible, but we also want transparency and standards. Essentially, I suppose, I think you should be able to watch what you want, but you should be in no doubt as to what it is.

Looking to the future, there is help in the past. If you have never read it, or haven’t read it for some time, take a few minutes to read A Hundred Years, C.P. Snow’s legendary editorial of May 1921 to celebrate the centenary of The Manchester Guardian (as it was called until 1959). It is in this leader that Snow made the famous remark “Comment is free, but facts are sacred,” and, while few may see much resonance of Snow’s high-minded newspaper in GB News, his aphorism illustrates the distinction which Ofcom is finding hard to police and GB News is blurring. So if we create a new framework to govern our media, it has to be one which recognises both parts of the phrase. And I say this without prejudice: I offer commentary for a living so hardly regard it as a dishonourable business. Neil Oliver may spin his wildest webs of conspiracy and subterfuge, and they will be judged on their content and plausibility, and that is a perfectly healthy engagement over opinions in the public square, but if he were seen to be using the notion of GB News as a news-gathering, which is to say factually based, organisation as a kind of imprimatur, it would be at that point that I would have a problem.

Let’s be honest. GB News and, say, the BBC are not the same things. Their functions may glance against each other, and they may, in very specific circumstances, compete against each other, but to regard them as eiusdem generis is as sensible as creating a rulebook which governs steak knives and halberds. You will find more meaning, and more potential for error, in the lacunae than you do in text. So as a community, as politicians, as regulators, as journalists, as commentators, as creatives, as technicians, as business leaders and entrepreneurs, let’s sit back for a moment, and make sure we’re asking the right questions to get the right answers. Because whether you blame the government, or Ofcom, or GB News, or the political culture, we haven’t been looking far enough ahead or thinking two moves in advance, which is why we find ourselves frustrated and angry. We can do better.