People say a lot of things about GB News: that it’s ridden with glitches, that it’s a hotbed of right-wing conspiracies, that nobody watches.
But nearly two years on from its launch, some people are definitely watching. It may not be a mainstream staple, but in December GB News beat Sky News for prime-time ratings (though it remained behind for all-day viewership).
Last month the channel’s chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos told staff GB News was entering “phase three” of its development and would be cutting costs and inefficiencies. (The channel this month released its accounts for its first year operating, which showed it lost ten times as much money as it earned.)
So what does phase three look like? What’s attracting people to watch? Has the outlet professionalised? How right-wing is it?
To find out, Press Gazette set about watching the entire schedule from the daily rendition of the national anthem at 5.59am until 11.59pm on Wednesday 22 March.
The experience, it turned out, took in both respectable straight news and fare that might look at home on prime-time Fox News. It featured segments that were genuinely entertaining, others that were rather more dull, a fistful of technical errors and a couple of factual ones.
Join Press Gazette reporter Bron Maher as he recounts his journey.
Toilet mics and stair lifts: Breakfast with Eamonn and Isabel, 6-9.30am
The first technical glitch came five minutes into the day. At 6.04 am Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, hosts of Breakfast with Eamonn and Isabel, threw over to an interview on College Green with Conservative MP Conor Burns.
Burns, speaking about Harriet Harman’s unsuitability to chair a hearing into whether Boris Johnson “recklessly misled” the Commons (while an evangelist behind him held aloft a placard commending the viewer to hell), had his voice distorted by a heavy echo.
Prompted by audience complaints about the sound issue, Holmes disclosed that a GB News guest had once dropped a microphone down the toilet, “but instead of throwing it in the bin, they kept using it here. It’s not reliable”. (It has since been disposed of, he added.)
Holmes and Webster are entertaining hosts: her reactions provide a proxy for the audience as Holmes says whatever is top of his mind, which over the three-and-a-half-hour programme included bees, drugs, ties, stair lifts and his trousers falling down while he was on holiday.
It also included Northern Ireland, which was a central part of the day’s news agenda. MPs were due to vote that day on part of Rishi Sunak’s so-called Windsor framework for goods movement between the UK and the European single market.
GB News has made an effort to court unionists in Northern Ireland, hiring the Democratic Unionist Party’s Arlene Foster as a host and stepping in to cover the Orange marches last year when the BBC dropped its live coverage.
At one point on Wednesday morning the DUP’s Chief Whip in Westminster, Sammy Wilson, appeared on GB News to discuss the Windsor framework vote. Holmes, himself from Belfast, was deferential towards Wilson but critical of the DUP’s refusal to restore the power-sharing government should the framework be passed, asking: “So you’ll keep the United Kingdom together, but you’ll not keep Northern Ireland together?”
The programme was otherwise light on politics, but did get onto traditional conservative fare with a discussion of whether sex education had “gone too far”.
Holmes announced the topic saying: “One of the biggest providers of school lesson plans… has sparked controversy by selling resources, references, sex toys and lots of other things”. (This was not quite true: as was made clear later, the school lesson plans under discussion did refer to sex toys, but did not involve actually bringing them into schools.)
‘Don’t be diplomatic, you’re on GB News!’ - 9.30-11.50am
The first turn right, though, came with To The Point, a show hosted by Daily Mail columnist Andrew Pierce and broadcaster Bev Turner. Contrary to what progressive critics of GB News might expect, the pair and their guests (who included Daily Mirror associate editor Kevin Maguire) were relatively critical of Boris Johnson in discussions of his Privileges Committee hearing (which happened later that day).
The show did however open the airwaves to right-wing voices that would rarely make it on national TV otherwise (something that was to become a recurring theme).
One of the more entertaining segments of the day came when Turner and Pierce brought on the deputy leader of UKIP, Rebecca Jane, and invited her to slate rival eurosceptic group, the Reform (formerly Brexit) Party.
“Unfortunately, in my opinion Reform are a one-man ego trip,” Jane said.
A discussion of Partygate also led to the second factual error of the day, when Turner said Johnson should have come clean early about his lockdown partying because his chance of Covid reinfection had been low.
“There’s no evidence that he would’ve been hospitalised” if he caught it again, Turner said. “There’s nobody that’s got it worse a second time, nobody across the world.” (This is not true.)
Several of the programmes on Wednesday discussed whether Prince Harry could be deported from the US as a result of his drug use admissions. During one such discussion Pierce, finding a guest insufficiently bombastic, urged them: “Don’t be diplomatic, you’re on GB News!”
This was shortly followed with a cut to adverts while Pierce was mid-sentence, which was the third time it had happened that morning.
GB News straight news hours - 11.50am to 6pm
Turner and Pierce were succeeded by a news programme that would not have looked out of place on Sky News, likely because presenter Mark Longhurst spent 20 years there.
Longhurst’s programme was punctuated by Prime Minister’s Questions and cut short by the Johnson Parliamentary hearing, but while on air he kept his show tightly impartial. He even got Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman on to discuss China.
However, because it was so straight, there wasn't much to write about, so it was at approximately this time I got interested in the locations the running weather update at the bottom of the screen was cycling through. I have charted them below.
London received just one weather update across the day in GB News' weather panel. Greater Manchester got three, the same as all of Northern Ireland and all of Wales.
Boris Johnson’s hearing gave way to Patrick Christys’ show, which was shortened by two hours because of the proceedings. Christys, a young Talkradio alumnus, led a rowdier programme than Longhurst but nonetheless kept his show reasonably balanced as they digested the Privileges Committee session.
‘I’m a capitalist - but is capitalism broken?’ - 6-7pm
From 6pm GB News charges unashamedly into opinion content, with one-time Apprentice winner Michelle Dewberry the tip of the spear.
Although Dewberry prides her show, Dewbs & Co, on its “respectful disagreement”, her two guests - Remainer Jo Phillips and former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib - were in alignment over Boris Johnson.
“He sounded like a half-wit,” said former Paddy Ashdown spokesperson Phillips.
Discussions became more tense when conversation turned to the Windsor framework. To Phillips, Rishi Sunak’s agreement with the EU was “probably the least worst option”.
To Habib, who had earlier that month joined the Reform Party: “What [the EU is] trying to do, 100 years ago, would have resulted in a shooting war.” (He also announced he may stand against Boris Johnson should he face a by-election in his constituency.)
Across the 18 hours I was watching the channel, GB News hosts frequently prompted the audience to email in with their opinions. But none read out so many as Michelle Dewberry, who urged viewers in Northern Ireland to get in touch with their views on the Windsor framework.
Those views were almost uniformly hostile to the proposals, prompting Dewberry to note: “Lots of people agreeing with you, Ben [Habib]!”
Phillips responded: “They always do…”
This raised an interesting point. Thus far, programmes on GB News had been balanced in the sense Ofcom asks for: the weight of the commentary certainly leaned right, but there had always been a punchy personality to put the other side’s argument forcefully, as well as a series of rigidly straight news bulletins throughout the day.
[Read more: Ofcom chief says Tory MPs can present shows on GB News and interview who they like]
But this was not true of the audience’s feedback. Responses from the viewers were overwhelmingly (but not totally) right-leaning, and frequently espoused opinions more forthrightly than anyone on-screen.
No great surprise there: GB News marketed itself to a particular audience and that’s who now watches it. The effect of this, though, was to make it appear to anyone watching as though Northern Ireland was united in opposition to the Windsor framework - which is the opposite of what polls indicate.
This seems to have produced a neat dynamic for GB News - there’s no need to be unbalanced editorially when your audience provides the opinions you’re not allowed to.
On the other hand, Dewberry seemed to be having a sort of leftist Damascene moment throughout the programme.
“I want to talk to you about inflation. It was expected to go down, it's gone up - what does that mean to you and what's causing it? I think a lot of it now is greed from business owners. And I say that as a capitalist. Is capitalism broken?”
Dewberry went on to stress that she is a capitalist three more times – each time alongside a pronouncement that business owners are price gouging the public. (If you ever need a new perch, Dewbs, Novara Media is expanding.)
Drinking with Nige - 7-8pm
A liberal viewer might expect to be more alarmed by Nigel Farage’s show than any other on the schedule - but in the event he was a more placid host than others that evening. It was not completely without incendiary comments, though - he claimed that Johnson would likely lose his Uxbridge seat in a by-election because “London is going through very, very big demographic change and it's a demographic change that suits the Labour Party far more than the Conservatives”. But in all, the show had the same energy as chatting politics with a fixture at your local old man pub.
This became particularly so during Talking Pints, a segment in which Farage discusses a subject of the day with a guest over a beer. On Wednesday that guest was a former American rear-admiral who is now chief executive of a business hoping to make small modular nuclear reactors a major part of the power grid.
Interesting as the energy discussion was, most of my attention was taken up with watching Farage’s pint disappear approximately twice as quickly as his opposite number’s.
The regina Moggologues - 8-9pm
During Wednesday’s Privileges Committee hearing Sir Charles Walker MP asked Boris Johnson whether he would denounce “concerted effort[s] to delegitimise the committee, to call us a kangaroo court”.
Johnson had said: “There should be no attempt to bully any colleague in any matter whatever… I deprecate the term you have just used, I don’t want to repeat it.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg did not have the same qualms as his former boss, using the term "kangaroo court" twice in his hour-long State of the Nation programme. (That was relatively tame - in the next show Dan Wootton would use it nine times.)
The one-time Leader of the House of Commons was the most pro-Boris personality of the day, accusing the former prime minister’s critics (in a “Mogg-ologue”, per the banner below the screen) of suffering “Boris spongiform encephalopathy… a newly-discovered wasting disease of the brain which particularly affects metropolitan types”.
As before, audience commentary was more intense than Rees-Mogg’s own - but the MP had the wherewithal to say “now you really are going too far, Peter” when a viewer wrote in to suggest the UK begin guillotining its Parliamentarians.
By this stage in the evening I had switched to a deluxe, cinema–style GB News viewing experience via my home TV projector.
The move from a Youtube livestream to GB News’ app on Amazon Fire stick also meant I was seeing the channel’s commercial advertisements for the first time. Until then I had just been seeing promotional spots for the channel's own programmes. (Notably absent from those spots: Calvin Robinson and Neil Oliver, two of GB News' more controversial personalities.)
I don’t know how far the ads were targeted at me in particular versus the GB News audience in general, but given so many advertisers had jumped ship in the channel’s first week of operation, it was interesting to note whose commercials were appearing nowadays.
‘No spin, no censorship’: 9-11pm
By my count Dan Wootton used the term “MSM” - the acronym, not the phrase “mainstream media” - seven times across his two-hour programme. His guest Amanda Platell used it one further time. That both write for the UK’s biggest-selling newspaper went un-commented upon.
Wootton’s show is the closest GB News gets to classic Fox News pugilism. While he was no fan of Johnson, Wootton said, Partygate was “a media stitch-up enabled by… a gang of establishment globalists”. The audience appear not to have agreed: a rapid poll indicated 60% of respondents felt Johnson had both “intentionally and recklessly” misled Parliament.
It wasn’t just the populist politics that marked Wootton out from his GB News colleagues. His interview style was markedly different: whereas every other host I saw on Wednesday gave their guests plenty of time to talk, Wootton freely shunted his interviewees onto new talking points mid-sentence.
Wootton’s show is what GB News’ critics fear the entire channel to be. I suspect Wootton likes it that way: he obviously relishes biting bloody chunks out of his political opponents whilst running a show rife with opinion and interruptions under a “no spin, no censorship” strapline.
But while we’re in the spirit of being straight-talking and un-PC: as a gay man I urge the Competition and Markets Authority to look into GB News’ monopolisation of the market for right–leaning gay male broadcasters. I spotted at least six across the day, and it simply can’t be in the interests of the consumer that they’re all centralised in one place.
Headliners: 11-11.59pm
Headliners, the light-hearted final programme on GB News’ weekday schedule, is a marriage of Mock the Week and the BBC’s now-defunct “The Papers” programme. That night it was presented by Andrew Doyle, co-creator of the satirical characters Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath. I imagine it is very enjoyable for some people.
It was not right-wing in the partisan sense. Instead, Doyle and the two comedians appearing alongside him took aim at woke things occasionally while reviewing the front pages. Personally, the highlight of this programme was seeing that my colleague William Turvill’s story about worrying new College of Policing guidelines (since ditched) had made it to the front page of The Telegraph.
At one point Doyle turned his attention to a Guardian article about the recent cultural omnipresence of the term “vibe”.
“It’s just not a word I hear very often,” Doyle told his guests, which was a brave admission of out-of-touchness for someone whose career is built on their clear-eyed skewering of youth these days.
What I learned about GB News
So 18 hours later I was left to wonder: who watches GB News? Is it one group of die-hard fans, or is it a shifting constellation of people who feel they aren’t getting what they want from the other broadcasters? And how much room for growth does that audience have?
The morning show with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster is a conventional breakfast programme, albeit a little eccentric and lower-rent. Reskinned for a different network, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at Mark Longhurst’s show somewhere else. It’s only in the evening that GB News starts serving the conservative red meat.
Surely these different types of television attract completely different groups?
Unfortunately, GB News doesn’t have data for how its viewership changes through the day. I am only able to contemplate the effect of the channel on myself.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
