Fox is finished but GB News has a future if it grows up

‘You’re missing the point,’ the CEO of GB News, Angelos Frangopoulos, told the BBC’s Today hosts Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan yesterday.

The presenters were challenging what constitutes ‘news’ for GB, which gives Conservative MPs a platform to interview each other.

But what they really objected to, as do many of their colleagues in the media and some politicians, was the right of GB News to exist at all.

The channel, which admits to being ‘destructive’, finds itself in the spotlight as never before this week in the fallout over an unhinged broadcast on Tuesday by its errant ‘star’ Laurence Fox.

There are two parts to this tale: one transient, Fox himself, and the other more serious, our very ‘broadcasting ecology’, as former Sky presenter and Reaction columnist Adam Boulton put it.

Fox first. The reactions to his final (there can be no way back) rant on GB News ranged from the usual outrage at this increasingly loose cannon’s offensiveness to actual nausea.

The target of Fox’s attack, political reporter Ava Evans, said she felt ‘physically sick’ after listening to his ‘who would want to shag that?’ diatribe against her, broadcast live on GB News host Dan Wootton’s show.

Fox has taken Wootton down with him and questions are being asked about the judgement of Tory MPs, including deputy party chairman Lee Anderson and former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who host shows on GB News.

These people still have careers and care what people think. Fox is past such niceties. In fact, he is triumphant, refusing to back down even though he did eventually issue an apology of sorts to Evans in a rambling video on X (formerly Twitter).

He always meant to be a martyr to free speech and his cancellation by the free speech channel is a victory for him, proving how right he was about cancel culture.

So now that even GB News can’t stomach the actor-turned-activist, where will he go? His acting career is surely finished; even those of us who watched old episodes of Lewis would find them too triggering going forward.

For true outliers there is perhaps more money to be made on the fringes, where Fox now joins that rarefied niche of other free speakers considered, by most, to be beyond the pale.

Russel Brand and Andrew Tate, both incidentally under police investigation for alleged sex offences, can show him how to monetise infamy.

An online presence can be lucrative for the most high-profile pariahs. Brand, who until recently could still pack out a theatre of adoring fans, must have made a mint on YouTube, until it suspended his advertising revenue.

There is also Rumble, an alt-right site for likeminded individuals. Tate, meanwhile, has his own online academy, to which his fellow misogynists can sign up for a hefty fee.

One thing Fox won’t lack is a following. Incredible as it may seem here in the mainstream, the more he has pushed at the boundaries, the more his fan base among fellow discontents has grown.

At the last count, he had over 413,000 followers on X (up several thousand since Tuesday) and for the mostly sad young men, susceptible to his woman-baiting narrative, his status as freedom fighter is now assured.

But what of GB News’s future? Its remit, to fill a populist gap in the broadcast news market, has been tested this week to breaking point and senior broadcasters, Boulton included, and the Tory MP Caroline Nokes, are calling for it to be shut down.

The Fox debacle, grim as it was, serves a useful purpose for those who have long campaigned against the channel.

Robinson regards such media as an existential threat, telling the Press Gazette in June that “news and highly partisan views are now routinely broadcast alongside each other”, threatening British broadcasters’ reputation for impartiality.

Frangopoulos, in defence, insists that GB News boasts a breadth of content and has a different, but not wrong, way of carrying out discussions.

The channel undoubtedly stirs up far right prejudices, but as a disruptor to the broadcasting status quo it gives voice to ordinary people who feel unrepresented by the metropolitan elite’s cultural assumptions.

Only two years’ old, its ratings have been a slap in the face to establishment rivals, beating both Sky News and the BBC’s news channel in some slots, with GB News big hitters Nigel Farage and, more unfortunately, Dan Wootton scoring particularly well.

Clearly, there is a demand for this type of television and if GB News is taken off air – it is currently being investigated by Ofcom – another version would surely pop up in its place.

To try to avoid another Fox episode, the regulator itself must move with the times and review its rules in the wake of the emergence of new, US-style broadcast media.

As for GB News, it could take this opportunity to, well, grow up. Stewart Purvis, formerly CEO of ITN and an Ofcom executive, said the GB News management was ‘trying to face both ways’ by claiming to be an accurate, serious news organisation while also being sensationalist.

Managers now need to find a better balance between respectable recruits, such as bona fide journalists Andrew Pierce and Christopher Hope, and the lunatic wing it courts.

The attention seekers like Fox might be big box office but, as this week has shown, they are counter-productive if GB News can’t control them. 

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