GB News — the first dedicated television news channel to launch in Britain in more than two decades — went live for the first time yesterday.
Yet even before its first broadcast at 7pm GMT, it has had to fend off unfavorable comparisons to the firebrand and divisive populism of US network Fox News.
The British broadcaster says it aims to cater to a broad audience, including marginalized communities that backed the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the EU.
It has billed itself as “Britain’s news channel,” unashamedly draping itself in the red white and blue of the Union Jack as it prepares to face off with more established competitors such as the BBC and Sky News.
“Our presenters will have the freedom to say what they think, to have some fun and to be brave about the issues that really matter to the people of Britain,” GB News director of news and programming John McAndrew said.
The station, which has a staff of 140 journalists based at newly acquired offices in west London, has attracted a string of high-profile UK broadcasters.
Chief among them is veteran journalist Andrew Neil.
Even he is being cast as an outsider, despite having worked for 25 years at the BBC, edited Rupert Murdoch’s establishment weekly the Sunday Times and founded Britain’s last successful TV start-up, Sky.
“We are for people who think the existing channels don’t quite represent how they see things,” Neil told London’s Evening Standard newspaper.
The media stalwart has had to rebuff criticism since the creation of GB News was first announced in September last year claiming the channel would be a British clone of the bombastic Fox News and would feed the flames of an already fractious culture war.
McAndrew this week told trade publication Press Gazette that the channel would not be a “hate-filled divisive shout-fest.”
To its detractors, the similarities between Fox and the new channel are clear. GB News’ opinion-driven coverage, heavily focused on anchors and personalities, seems like a carbon copy of the right-wing US network, they say.
The promise to reach audiences hostile to the BBC and which were under-represented in the Brexit debate has also drawn comparisons to Fox’s model, which cultivated viewers opposed to the “mainstream media” and existing politics.
Neil’s own show is to contain a segment called “Woke Watch,” but he has dismissed the comparisons as “easy, inaccurate” analysis.
“In terms of format, we are like Fox, but we won’t be like Fox in that they come from a hard-right disinformation fake news conspiracy agenda,” he has said.
Jane Martinson, a professor of journalism at London’s City University said that it should not be possible to recreate US-style news in the UK because of the British Office of Communications’ strict rules for news channels.
“We shouldn’t have something like Fox or indeed CNN, because we have impartiality guidelines and rules,” she said. “It will be really interesting to see how they [GB News] toe the line.”
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