GB News will flourish if the success of partisan, rightwing TV in Australia is any guide – The Guardian

It is probably fair to say that GB News, the UKs new conservative TV channel, has launched to a somewhat mixed reception.

The Telegraph derided the content as unutterably awful; boring, repetitive and cheapskate. Others criticised its claims of being anti-woke and unbiased as simply bias in another direction.

Still more have pointed to the age of the presenters, wondered aloud why any young person would tune in, and predicted its swift demise. After all, Britain is not ready for a rightwing TV channel.

But those looking in from afar specifically Australia are warning not to underestimate it and its leader.

And they predict that ultimately the channel will blossom like the rightwing, Murdoch-run Sky News Australia, where the GB News chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos, made his name.

Sky is very successful here, particularly when you also take account of the online numbers, says Paul Barry, the presenter of the ABCs Media Watch program and one of Sky News Australias fiercest critics. I am sure it will work in the UK.

They are underestimating him, says Janine Perrett, a veteran business journalist who worked with Frangopoulos for a decade at Sky.

Dr Denis Muller, a senior researcher at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, also doesnt hesitate to predict success for GB News.

I think so, absolutely, he says. This is part of redtop populist journalism. There is a big appetite for that in the UK.

Media watchers in Australia already see product parallels between the nascent GB News, which began broadcasting on 13 June, and Sky in Australia.

The new channel has borrowed heavily from Australias Sky News in its focus and formats, although unlike the Australian version, which reverts to a breaking news format during the day, GB News is going down the path of 24-hour commentary and discussions.

Frangopoulos, who spent two decades at Sky News Australia, is credited with having honed the art of cheap but compelling panel-style conservative television.

Sky News in Australia began life as a 24-hour news channel in 1996, owned by the commercial TV networks, News Corp and the telecommunications company Telstra. But it soon added a night-time panel format, known as Sky After Dark.

Since Rupert Murdochs News Corp took full ownership in 2016, the After Dark lineup has morphed into a steady diet of strident rightwing conservative opinion, more aligned with Fox News. It doesnt mind a controversy or three.

GB News has gone straight for the part of Sky that rates best: panel shows heavy on opinion and commentary.

If Frangopoulos continues to follow his previous playbook, one can expect GB News will take aim at the same hot-button issues that are daily fodder in Australia: the national broadcaster, climate change, immigration, Muslims, Covid lockdowns, government spending, the opposition, environmentalists and political correctness in schools.

The first ratings for GB News have been promising.

According to the UK TV industry magazine Broadcast, GB News peaked in its opening minutes with 336,000 viewers and averaged 262,000 viewers, meaning it outperformed the 100,000 who watched BBC News across the hour and the 46,000 who watched the British Sky News.

Frangopoulos comes with a long pedigree in commercial TV news and nearly two decades in 24-hour news. Former colleagues in Australia describe him as a real newsman.

Hes one of the best I have worked with, says Perrett.

She says he was particularly good at spotting and managing the talent and convincing them to stay at a network that paid them very little.

He certainly has TV news in his blood, says David Speers, who served as Sky News Australias political editor for over a decade until 2020, when he moved to the ABC, Australias public broadcaster. He began as a television journalist and he has extraordinary drive and vision about what he wants.

Both point to Frangopouloss willingness to try new things and innovate.

Sky in Australia began as a smell of an oily rag news channel where presenters did their own makeup and appeared in front of automated cameras. But soon it was winning awards.

Its election coverage was praised. The channel revived a peoples town hall for staging election debates. Its in-depth political interviews were rewarded with Walkleys, Australian journalisms highest honour.

But over the years its night-time lineup of provocative panel-style discussions crept deeper into the schedule and has steered solidly to the right.

In those early days, these panels often featured journalists from other media groups because they would appear for free and were polished talent. But under Frangopoulos the channel began recruiting provocateurs, mainly from the right but sometimes from the left as well.

Frangopoulos was happy to have a contest of ideas and didnt mind having journalists from non-News Corp publications on Sky, Perrett says.

But that changed when News Corp bought out the other shareholders in 2016 and took full control of Sky in Australia. Frangopoulos quickly sniffed what the new management wanted and Sky lurched further to the right.

The extent to which Frangopoulos is responsible for the Foxification of Sky News in Australia is a matter of hot debate.

Anti-immigration voices like Pauline Hanson, the leader of the Australias One Nation party, and Mark Latham, a maverick former Labor leader who has now joined One Nation as a state MP, were given airtime by Frangopoulos.

There were some ugly incidents under his watch. Former Liberal MP Ross Cameron was sacked from the Outsiders program the channels most over-the-top panel show after he described Chinese people as black-haired, slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned. Latham was sacked from the same show over his response to a video about feminism made by students at Sydney Boys high school. Latham called the teenagers dickheads and said: I thought the first guy was gay.

After the full takeover by News Corp, a number of its high-profile rightwing columnists were given prime-time slots the likes of Andrew Bolt and Miranda Devine.

Appearances by media identities from other organisations were phased out, Labor presenters mostly dropped, and figures like Peta Credlin, former conservative prime minister Tony Abbotts chief of staff, were promoted as stars and cross-promoted through columns in Murdoch-owned newspapers.

Barry says the After Dark lineup is now regularly getting peaks of 85,000 viewers and an average viewership of 60,000.

Its three to four times the audience they get throughout the day for the news channel, he says.

And when its in its panel mode, it regularly outguns the ABCs 24-hour news channel.

People who watch Sky here love it, says Barry. The Australian [Murdochs national daily newspaper] also has strong appeal to its audiences. Stories on climate change or political correctness attract hundreds of comments.

While that partisan popularity is evident observers say Sky has also been a contributing factor in the coarsening of the political debate in Australia. Its commentators often rail against against what they see as leftwing abuse of politicians they admire and attack journalists who take Sky to task on accuracy.

In recent weeks the channel has been forced to apologise to a former Greens leader after falsely accusing him of inciting criminal behaviour by anti-logging protests and to former prime minister Kevin Rudd after Credlin claimed his petition calling for a royal commission into the Murdoch media was a data-harvesting exercise.

Another commentator, Alan Jones, was also forced this year to publish a correction to a 2020 editorial railing against Covid restrictions in Victoria after a watchdog ruling that he had misrepresented the research on the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns.

Most who discount Skys influence in Australia point to its relatively small audience on pay TV compared with, say, the main ABC channel, which regularly attracts 700,000-plus viewers to its prime-time news bulletin, and the millions who listen to the ABC radio news.

But Muller says Skys influence is much greater than its ratings.

Its influence on Australian politics is amplified by being part of the bigger News Corp commentariat, he says.

News Corp has also employed deliberate strategies to get Sky in front of decision-makers. Federal politicians receive free Foxtel pay TV subscriptions in their offices, giving them access to Sky News. Sky News is also ubiquitous in all the executive lounges at airports.

Sky has also sought to extend its reach into regional Australia through deals with television operators to carry its After Dark programs on free-to-air TV. This could see it reach 7 million people in some of the more conservative areas.

Muller says Sky has also extended its reach with an aggressive strategy to disseminate its content via the internet and social media to international audiences.

The After Dark shows are cut into bite-sized videos that are then uploaded on to Skys YouTube channel so they can be readily shared via social media.

Barry agrees with Muller: Some of those videos get over a million views. Its a central part of News Corps strategy to appeal to rightwing audiences internationally.

Popular Sky News Australia videos include reports on an alleged coverup by China on the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of Covid-19; commentary on Joe Bidens alleged cognitive decline; Hunter Biden and allegations of corrupt dealings; the stolen US election.

This in turn has seen Sky After Dark commentators venture ever deeper into US politics and topics that might be more at home on a QAnon website, such as the Great Reset, which according to Skys Rowan Dean is an evil agenda by woke billionaires to dismantle capitalism that is being pushed via the next Davos economic summit and promoted by Prince Charles.

Whether GB News will elect to actively pursue an online audience through social media remains to be seen, but Frangopoulos will be familiar with all the strategies to make his mouse roar.

Among Frangopouloss former colleagues in Australia theres speculation that GB News could be a stalking horse for News Corps ambitions to launch a Fox News-style channel in the UK, or at the least a testing ground to see if a right-aligned news product can work.

News Corp had talked about starting its own Fox News-style channel in the UK but in April announced it was no longer pursuing a traditional cable channel and would instead focus on online video rather than linear TV.

Few leave the bosom of News Corp and remain within the fold. But Frangopoulos appears to still enjoy good standing, despite departing from Sky News Australia in 2018 for a job at Sky News Arabia, which is not owned by News.

Frangopoulos surprised many by appearing at Lachlan Murdochs 2019 Christmas drinks at his harbourside mansion in Sydney and was seen chatting cordially with Newss executives.

GB News has so far received benign coverage in the News Corp-owned UK papers, which are not shy about attacking media rivals.

The question many in Australia are asking is: if GB News succeeds will Murdoch be willing to cede the territory of rightwing television to another? And is there room for two?

The Guardian approached Frangopoulos for an interview, but he was not available during the launch week.

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GB News will flourish if the success of partisan, rightwing TV in Australia is any guide - The Guardian