GB News, the UK’s first new news channel in decades, launched on Sunday night with a monologue from the estimable Andrew Neil, setting out the channel’s philosophy.
‘We will puncture the pomposity of our elites and politics, business, media and academia and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture for the threat to free speech and democracy that it is’, he said.
Just 48 hours later and GB News’s detractors have already proven him right.
Anyone who has bothered to watch GB News’s output in its first couple of days would not have detected anything resembling ‘hate’
Stop Funding Hate, a pearl-clutching campaign group that seeks to deprive news outlets it disagrees with of advertising revenue, has managed to get Ikea, Nivea, Kopparberg, Grolsch, Octopus Energy and the Open University to pull their ads, amid claims GB News is somehow fuelling hatred and division with its chatty, unwoke approach to current-affairs coverage.
Stop Funding Hate – imagine if a Guardianista with a Twitter account ran Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association – has been urging its followers to complain to advertisers about the supposedly ‘hateful’ company they are unwittingly keeping.
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