GB News has been left majorly red-faced – and no, we don’t mean that Andrew Neil has rejoined its lineup.
Instead, it turns out that a major New Year’s viewership milestone for the TV home of arch-Unionist Neil Oliver was actually a bit of a damp squib.
In the days following our Hogmanay parties up and down the land, GB News was crowing – understandably – about figures from Barb, which measures TV audiences.
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It had found that more than one million viewers tuned into GB News simultaneously as we entered 2024, as reported by Press Gazette.
The channel’s live programming on the night was hosted by comedian Andrew Doyle.
At this point, you might think alarm bells would be ringing. One million people bringing in the bells with Andrew Doyle?
But as any true fan of GB News will know, the technology in the newsroom often seems to go awry. The bells were silent.
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And so all that was heard instead was the sound of keyboards click-clacking away as the news stories went out the next day – a huge viewership milestone for GB News! The first time it had reached that audience accolade since when it first launched and many of us tuned in out of morbid curiosity.
The Jouker is guilty as charged.
So, what’s the reality? It’s certainly not that one million people were watching. In fact, it’s not even that 100,000 were watching.
Barb has now revealed that GB News averaged 33,000 viewers for its Hogmanay fireworks coverage.
Not quite a million. So, how did the error happen?
Barb told Press Gazette: “The New Year’s Eve Fireworks were broadcast across several channels with very similar audio feeds.
“Barb’s ability to report which channel is being viewed relies partly on matching the audio output from TV sets to a channel.
“In this instance, our audio-matching process has incorrectly attributed some viewing of the New Year’s Eve Fireworks to GB News that should have been attributed to BBC One and other channels.”
Journalists and numbers – never a good combo…
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