Fox News Gets a British Accent
In the months leading up to the launch of Great Britain’s newest television channel, GB News, its backers insisted that it wouldn’t be a British version of Fox News. They were right in one way: Fox is a slick product with fancy studios and whizzy graphics. By contrast, when GB News went on the air Sunday night, it looked as though it had been filmed in an abandoned strip club—all dark walls and neon lights—and suffered from poorly synchronized sound. When the channel’s lead anchor, Andrew Neil, concluded an interview with the Scottish historian Neil Oliver, he said that he hoped to see Oliver again, “and I promise [you] next time we’ll get you a better microphone.” The next day, an afternoon host, Gloria De Piero, encouraged the channel’s regional reporters, standing at attention in four little onscreen boxes, to say how happy they were that the channel had launched. They couldn’t hear her. Silence reigned.
For GB News’s target audience, its scrappy, homespun nature might be part of its charm—proof that this is a plucky upstart taking on Britain’s state broadcaster, the BBC, and the long-established Sky News. GB News has been hyped as a major shift in British television, away from its tradition of staid objectivity and toward the American climate of passionate, hyper-partisan anchors and highly opinionated programming. Although Britain’s broadcasting laws—which require news channels to be impartial—will place some limits on what GB News can do, its creators clearly believe that U.S.-style grievance politics can sustain at least a low-budget, tactically neutered version a right-wing television-news channel. Britain hasn’t had one of those before. The shift is real.
