GB News is the most interesting experiment in British television news since Sky in 1989. The brainchild of Andrew Neil (who is also chairman of The Spectator), the channel is pinning its hopes on there being an audience for something different. The thinking goes that the mainstream broadcasters reflect the progressive pieties of London rather than the values of the rest of the country. Critics have characterised the channel as ‘right-wing’, though Neil and his team have been careful not to embrace the label.
Of course, GB News isn’t the first broadcaster to cover the news with a particular slant — Channel 4 News has been doing so for a long time without a peep from the regulator. GB News’s crime is that it has the wrong slant. This has prompted a largely Twitter-based boycott campaign in which people threaten brands they don’t buy with custom they don’t give unless adverts they haven’t seen are withdrawn from a channel they don’t watch — all because people they don’t know might have opinions they don’t like.
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