On election night in November, when Fox News called Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden before any other major network it marked a turning point. It took nine more days for CNN and NBC – far less hostile to Biden than Fox – to make the same call. By November 7th, Fox declared total victory for Biden, from then on referring to him as “president-elect”.
It seems a small ask of a major broadcaster to adhere to the facts. But Fox has long established itself as somewhat of an outlier. Without the broadcaster it is doubtful Donald Trump would have achieved such profound reach: prior to his election in 2016, Fox gave airtime to his Obama-birtherism conspiracy; and throughout his tenure in the White House the network legitimised his creative relationship with the truth, and aided in radicalising swathes of the American electorate.
The subsequent storming of the Capitol was no fluke, but the product of a lengthy campaign to sow doubt in the machinery of the state.Trump-friendly media played its part, as did social media’s pernicious role in entrenching polarisation. None of this is indicative of a healthy media ecosystem, whether Fox News saw the light in the end or not.
There has been nervous chatter about the so-called Fox-ification of the British media, with the advent of a new channel, GB News. Headed by BBC veteran Andrew Neil, the new broadcaster has been pitched as a right-wing alternative to established networks; a vehicle to challenge an otherwise pervasive woke orthodoxy.
Chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos marked out its territory clearly: “Some journalists and commentators seem too confident that their liberal-left assumptions must surely be shared by every sensible person in the land. But many of those same sensible people are fed up. They feel left out and unheard.”
“We’re confident there’s an appetite for a fresh approach to news in Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland,” Neil added. Perhaps he is right.
If there is a market for opinionated news headed by anchors with more verve and personality, then it will become apparent very quickly. If the public really is fed up of staid broadcasters mechanically repeating rigid heterodoxies then GB News’ investors will be laughing all the way to the bank. That remains to be seen.
But if it takes off and captures the public imagination, how soon will it upend our media landscape? And how soon before we have our own storming of the capitol on our hands, thanks to a politically motivated TV channel shifting the centre of gravity rightwards on the media landscape of Ireland and Britain?
Strict rules
We would do well to suspend the histrionics. Both Ireland and the UK have strict rules on impartiality, fairness and accuracy in broadcast, regulated by the BAI and Ofcom respectively. And, thanks to a 1987 decision to stop enforcing the fairness doctrine in the US (a policy requiring broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints), the American regulatory landscape appears somewhat lawless in comparison. For the moment, the conditions for GB News to ape the style and tactics of Fox are lacking.
But perhaps this is the first move in a bigger, totemic shift towards a more partisan terrain. A shift that could slowly undermine the cultural foundations of reliable – though far from perfect – stalwarts like the BBC and RTÉ. And we would be naive not to see some elements of Fox behind the desire to populate our screens with bigger characters, while stoking the flames of the culture wars as a primary marketing technique.
But GB news is hardly the first partisan broadcaster to capture our attention. The fanfare in Ireland that greeted CNN’s coverage of the American election, and the storming of the Capitol, was potent and widespread. And we would be doing ourselves a disservice to maintain that CNN – and similar establishment, Democrat-leaning broadcasters – are pure and devoid of partisanship. No more was it apparent than when anchor Don Lemon clapped upon reading a headline calling for Trump’s resignation.
Accurate news
If we do not see this kind of partisanship as deleterious, then we have to accept it – within reason – elsewhere. Lauding CNN and exalting its journalists, such as John King, to celebrity status while prematurely denouncing GB News, is an unstable foundation for critique. Instead, we should understand that opinions are not the enemy of the media but “falsity is”, as Zoe Williams put it in the Guardian.
At its core, this is revelatory of a much greater threat to our media landscape. Twitter and Facebook are vectors of misinformation; there is an epistemic crisis of fake news and conspiracy, emboldened by social media giants.
A properly regulated network – coming with big personalities, opinionated or not – is no villain. Increasing competition should raise the standards for broadcasting across the board. GB News may seem like an uninteresting endeavour, languishing in the depths of tired culture wars. But amid an epidemic of misinformation, more news – so long as it is accurate and truthful – is always better than less.