The Guardian watched a week's worth of output from the upstart rightwing channel in an attempt to understand the worldview at work - and how GB News gets away with sailing so close to the wind.
Since the broadcasting veteran Andrew Neil quit as chair three months after the channel's launch, complaining that he was in "a minority of one" about its direction, GB News has increasingly planted its flag on the radical right of British politics.
With a monthly reach of 2.8 million viewers - twice that of its Murdoch rival TalkTV - and a place in the political "pool" in which major broadcasters share filming duties, GB News's boss, Angelos Frangopoulos, told staff in a recent email, "we are firmly part of the mainstream media".
But some of the views regularly encountered on the channel are anything but mainstream.
Last summer it secured an additional £60m in funding from founding investors Paul Marshall an ex-Liberal Democrat who went on to be a vehement Brexiter - and Legatum Ventures Ltd, the Dubaibased financial firm behind the free-market Legatum Institute thinktank.
In January Marshall wrote on the website UnHerd, which he also funded, that Prince Harry had fallen victim to "the woke creed", which he claimed had also infected other institutions, including newsrooms. Rejecting this "woke creed" seems a constant preoccupation at GB News, which Frangopoulos styles as "staunchly non-metropolitan".
Much of its output is standard fare for a rolling news channel: last week there was Eurovision gossip and speculation about Phillip Schofield's future and Harry's car chase, punctuated by anodyne news updates.
This story is from the May 25, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the May 25, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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