GB News: This is why show was always destined for failure

The first reason why is simple enough. Despite boasting the kind of line-up that could elicit arousal at even the most evangelical pro-abstinence conference, it’s just not very good. Between a shocking number of technical glitches and basic broadcasting faux pas from people with enough television experience as to be sort of unbelievable, the entire network has been borderline unwatchable since its launch.

But the reasons why the channel is so poor extend well beyond the echoing and dark studio or failures to grasp the difference between sterling and Stirling.

The main reason that GB News is dramatically failing to live up to its hype is down to the simple fact that it set itself an impossible task: to become the voice of intellectual right-wing opposition to so-called culture war issues when no such position actually exists.

It tried to establish itself as a serious player in the news and broadcasting industry while selling itself as a 24-hour-a-day clickbait article. If I had chosen to create a satirical right-wing news channel, I would have considered hosting a segment entitled “Woke Watch” to be so on the nose as to undermine whatever point I was making – yet that didn’t stop GB News. However, that is not entirely the channel’s fault.

It’s hard to provide serious, intellectually meaningful commentary from a far-right perspective simply because much of the positions adopted by the right are narrative fictions. The far-right thrives on knee-jerk reactionary politics and ignorance far more than reasoned debate, despite its proponents painting themselves as logical thinkers. Often, it doesn’t matter how bereft of reason those arguments are, as long as the point is louder and appeals to an overly simplistic understanding of the world.

READ MORE: Nigel Farage announces he will present a daily show on GB News

This applies equally to the right’s misuse of “free speech” as a justification for the inclusion of even the most morally repugnant arguments. As with the false flags of logic and reason that the right march beneath, the reality is their support for free speech is purely a cynical means to further their own agenda. It seems far more reasonable to argue in favour of free expression than saying outright that you really just want to be able to use racial slurs without consequence.

When GB News first established itself, it used the same rhetorical ploys any number of far-right grifters have to justify why it deserved space on our television screens.

It was going to give a voice to the voiceless. It was going to be a champion of free speech. It was finally going to expose cancel culture for what it was, and respect every individual’s right to self-expression. Then along comes Guto Harri, a GB News presenter who briefly took the knee on air in protest at the shameful racist abuse English footballers faced after the Euro 2020 final – only for those very same free-speech champions to turn and demand that Harri be removed from the air – cancelled, if you will – and GB News bowed to their demands immediately.

Now the channel is in a tight spot, albeit one of its own making. In its bid to establish itself as a British Fox News and a voice for the political right in Britain it appears to have become so caught up in its own hype that it forgot that the political right’s advocacy for free speech was as superficial as Boris Johnson’s commitment to Test and Trace.

Now the channel can either tack further to the right to maintain its dwindling audience, contributing further to our country’s already fractured realities created by social media’s curated news feeds, or it can crumble into obscurity having found its intellectual foundations to have been built on sand.

THIS isn’t unlike the position that its spiritual sibling Fox News found itself in when it accurately reported that Donald Trump had lost the US election. Despite being, and continuing to be, a platform for white supremacists and QAnon zealots, it could not keep its claws in an audience that did not want its political narrative to be challenged or undermined.

The whiplash decision to announce a brand-new show fronted by Nigel Farage would suggest the former will be the path taken.

GB News’s director of programming John McAndrew has also just quit after allegedly being pressured into scrapping local content to instead spend time leaning entirely into culture war topics. Not exactly a surprising turn of events given how successful these issues have been in recruiting people into the political right.

Recent reports have shown that these culture war topics, and the misinformation contained within, are so effective that extremist organisations such as the English Defence League are now more focused on stirring up anger toward transgender people than the Muslim community which had so long been its focus.

Despite hiding behind the smokescreen of free speech, there is no real space for any form of disagreement within the political right. This is why many who have become radicalised and later try to leave extreme right-wing movements find it so difficult to do so: any deviation results in threats, abuse and more.

Unfortunately for GB News, this is the audience that has hitched themselves to it – and to keep them on board will require nothing short of total capitulation.