The only reason fringe channels are failing to flourish in Britain’s rightwing media swamp is because it is already full
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer channel. GB News, it appears, has lost half its value since it launched last year. Shareholder Discovery sold its stake in the channel in August, with accounts lodged after the sale showing that its 25% share of the company, bought initially for £20m, was offloaded for just £8m. One of the buyers, Vote Leave backer Sir Paul Marshall, said of his participation in the new funding round: “As investors we’re proud of what GB News is doing for media plurality in the UK, bringing fresh perspectives to the national conversation.” One of the channel’s “fresh perspectives” on the coronavirus vaccine is currently being investigated by media regulator Ofcom.
If ploughing more cash into a channel where the average daily view is less than a minute sounds like a waste of money, then spare a thought for those paying for Piers Morgan’s reported £50m deal with Talk TV. Ratings have been comically low. “Morgan has gone from Good Morning Britain to good evening no one,” said Slate. Other big names have not fared better. Earlier this year, Tom Newton Dunn did not register a single viewer for half of his evening broadcast. Having positioned themselves as challengers to mainstream “woke” channels catering to a limited viewership, both channels have now pivoted to telling us that they are in fact not in the business of “linear TV” at all, conjuring a new world of “content TV” in which no one actually watches the telly any more and instead scrolls through clips of it on social media. Except those who don’t watch television channels any more don’t want to follow them on social media either. Talk TV has 83,000 followers on TikTok, less than your average “this is what I ate in a day” account.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
