Prof Ivor Gaber
Professor of Political Journalism, University of Sussex
Email: ivor.gaber@sussex.ac.uk
Twitter: @ivorgaber
UK Election 2024
Section 7: News and journalism
73. Why the press still matters (Prof Steven Barnett)
74. When the Star aligned: how the press ‘voted’ (Prof Dominic Wring, Prof David Deacon)
75. Visual depictions of leaders and losers in the (still influential) print press (Prof Erik Bucy)
76. Towards more assertive impartiality? Fact-checking on BBC television news (Prof Stephen Cushion)
77. The outsize influence of the conservative press in election campaigns (Prof Dan Stevens, Prof Susan Banducci, Prof Ekaterina Kolpinskaya and Dr Laszlo Horvath)
78. GB News – not breaking any rules… (Prof Ivor Gaber)
79. Vogue’s stylish relationship to politics (Dr Chrysi Dagoula)
80. Tiptoeing around immigration has tangible consequences (Dr Maria Kyriakidou, Dr Iñaki Garcia-Blanco)
81. A Taxing Campaign (Prof David Deacon et al)
82. Not the Sun wot won it: what Murdoch’s half-hearted, last-minute endorsements mean for Labour (Dr John Jewell)
83. Is this the first podcast election? (Carl Hartley, Prof Stephen Coleman)
84. A numbers game (Prof Paul Bradshaw)
85. Election 2024 and the remarkable absence of media in a mediated spectacle (Prof Lee Edwards)
86. 2024: the great election turn-off (Prof Des Freedman)
The Editorial Charter of GB News states: ‘Impartiality and integrity are at the core of our commitment to delivering authoritative and accurate news the public trust ..’. GB News can, like Fox News its counterpart in the US, have the look of a ‘normal’ news channel. It bookends its almost endless opinion-led chat shows with travel information, weather forecasts and, above all, news bulletins. For the most part, the news is professionally presented and does not appear overladen with the political bias that is so clearly identifiable across the rest of the channel’s output. However, not everything is as it appears.
The news stories produced by GB News do not just provide a veneer of respectability for the TV channel but are sliced and diced across all its social media outlets. These include Facebook where it has 698,000 followers, Twitter 636,000 followers, Instagram 262,000 followers and a surprising 1.1million followers on the youth-orientated TikTok. However, its biggest social media following is on YouTube where it has 1.29million followers who use it to watch standalone items and its live feed (adding substantially to its daily TV audience) presenters are increasingly making reference to this streaming audience. In addition, its radio channel claims a weekly audience of 455,000 whilst its TV channel has a monthly reach of over three million, in other words GB News is not a minor player un the UK’s political ecology.
Arguably though its biggest impact comes from its news website which, the channel claims, reaches an average of 2.7m viewers per month. The trade magazine UK Press Gazette’s recent survey of UK news websites found that GB News was in twentieth place of the most used news sites, capturing 15 % of the audience – by comparison, Sky News, in seventh position, captured 36 % and the BBC News website had 38 million regular users.
The research being reported here involved monitoring all the items that were published on the GB News website under the ‘Politics’ banner in the last weeks of March, April, May and June 2024, a total of 559 items – an average of 20 stories a day. And it revealed a distinct right-wing bias in terms of the story selection.
In March, 25% of the politics postings favoured the Conservatives (13% pro-Tory and 12% anti-Labour), this compared with just 8% being either pro-Labour (2%) or anti-Conservative (6%). In April, the overall figure favouring the Conservatives was 24 %, made up of just 5% of items being pro-Conservative and 19% anti-Labour. In the same month the postings favouring Labour constituted 10% of the output (6% pro-Labour and 4% anti-Conservative).
In May, with a general election campaign under way, the channels’ pro-Tory/anti-Labour bias eased somewhat (perhaps because of an awareness that its viewers might be expecting more evenly balanced coverage during an election campaign). 18% of its output was classified as pro-Tory/anti-Labour, but this, more or less, even balance didn’t last as the gloves came off in June but with the Tories in the channel’s cross-hairs as their star presenter, Nigel Farage, became a Reform UK candidate. For whilst the balance between pro-Conservative and anti-Labour constituted 13% of the output (5% and 8%), 10% of the output was anti-Conservative and pro-Reform UK posts constituting a hefty 17% of all stories.
The survey also revealed some oddities, but in the context of GB News perhaps oddities is the wrong word. Throughout the period under review the station appeared somewhat obsessed with what it would no doubt term ‘woke’ issues, despite not a single survey showing that the British public prioritised the issue. Their posts on various ‘woke’ topics averaged 10% of their entire politics output across the four months monitored.
Another oddity was the channel’s focus on the American presidential election. Clearly an important issue, but one that is still five months away. Across the four months monitored, the channel devoted 11% of its entire politics coverage to the Biden/Trump context. Unsurprisingly, particularly after Biden’s poor debate performance, its coverage leaned very heavily in favour of Trump – with 10% of all posted being pro-Trump or anti-Biden and less than 1% anti-Trump/pro-Biden.
So overall we can conclude that despite protestations to the contrary GB News is consistently biased to the right, not just in terms of its presenters, but also its news coverage. But given that the Ofcom code does not cover written news on TV news station’s websites, the channel is not breaking any rules as such, only the spirit of its own Editorial Charter.
