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Who Cares About Your Opinion? Why the Foxification of British News Isn’t Working (Column)


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Who Cares About Your Opinion? Why the Foxification of British News Isn’t Working (Column)

https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/piers-morgan-uncensored-talktv-gb-news-foxification-1235266461/

 

Quote

So why is it all so strange? Well, despite heavy publicity, these shows and channels don’t appear to be resonating with U.K. audiences. “Piers Morgan Uncensored” has consistently shed viewers, from 317,000 overnight viewers on launch day, to less than 60,000 just over two weeks later. Wednesday’s episode received an average of 44,000 viewers, according to ratings body BARB. In comparison, a repeat of digital channel Quest’s “Salvage Hunters,” where people discover rusty old objects, received on average three times more viewers.

[...]


GB News has since widened its reach to a radio station and on-demand. It has relied on clips being spliced up to be shared on social media and has touted “billions” of digital views. In an interview with Press Gazette, the news network claimed that TikTok was one of their most popular platforms, where it has more than 200,000 followers. Yet in comparison, a TikTok account of a British man feeding his pet seagull currently has 3.2 million.

 

Fantastic. 😄

 

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What works in the USA doesn’t work in the UK. That’s not just because of Ofcom regulators. Unlike the United States circa 1996, the UK is already saturated with various outlets that cater to the right, especially in print media. Those outlets, like The Spectator, for example, are not only more established, but also have a healthy digital presence. As a result, startups like GB News and TalkTV are fighting an uphill battle for their own demographic. This is especially true for GB News, which launched with massive technical problems and managed to anger Andrew Neil enough to leave for Channel 4 of all places. 
 

Granted, the TV landscape is a bit different. Channel 4 is almost explicitly left-wing, while the BBC is accused on all sides of being biased against them (in other words, they’re centrist.) However, when the UK television audience is looking for a wide range of views represented in the news, a niche “shock jock” talk channel with the likes of Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow isn’t going to work.

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What's definitely forgotten here is that TalkTV...is basically radio on TV, as outside a few hours, it's just a rebranding of TalkRadio where most everyone is in front of cheap Hisense TVs in front of microphones doing a radio show that's simulcasting on TV, rather than in a radio studio, and badly. That is why the ratings nose-dived almost immediately; outside the curious seeing what their radio shows and people look like on TV now and a few gets, that's all they have for most of their broadcast day. Yes, Piers and their news block is all traditional TV setup, but that's a vast minority of their broadcast day,.

 

You can't sustain a radio simulcast on television unless it's designed for the medium, or fills a niche, which sports radio shows set up for a dynamic video simulcast with plenty of touches to tailor to both audiences can do rather easily. But Pat McAfee has that energy to walk around and do much more; your average talker, they're just sitting in a studio screaming into a spit-shielded mic and yelling at their producer for three hours or like Mike Levin's setup, screaming at the camera and destroying VU meters for three hours.

 

With most morning zoos, you see how the sausage is made and it looks like five hours of a group of four people in a studio both sleepy and looking like they'd rather be anywhere else. Sure, there have been radio studio simulcasts that are appealing, but unless you were Rush Limbaugh, who had years of experience doing television and knew how to frame his studio, you're not only not getting people to pay for that, but not want to look at those people for hours on end because they all kinda forget they need more than just a camera in the room, but extra television production features like graphics and interaction.

 

The main difference between America and UK/Canadian and Australian news though, is definitely the regulations, where news is clearly separated from opinion and can't be used to tee up the next hour of discussion. There's also a respect for the full audience where going off on people needlessly is going to turn people off, as what happened with Sun TV in Canada. There may be loud complainers, but they have the newspapers to complain to, and the radio. They just haven't made a good transition to television.

Edited by mrschimpf
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