Murdoch's U.K. Fox News Dream Fizzles
Rupert yanks TalkTV — his wannabe Brit counterpart — off linear, while right-wing rival, Paul Marshall, keeps spending
The Foxification of U.K. news is getting messy.
Less than three years ago, two billionaires — one a media titan and the other an arriviste — sought to disrupt the staid British broadcast landscape. Long dominated by the BBC news machine, ITV and Sky News, they would launch right-wing, opinion-centric media startups. Brits have had conservative and even reactionary newspapers forever, but TV had always been the province of centrist reporting. But in that moment amid Brexit and Covid, the U.K., much like the United States, experienced a backlash against the perceived “woke” agendas of the traditional news networks. In an effort to seize the moment, Rupert Murdoch launched TalkTV and pro-Brexit hedge-funder Sir Paul Marshall rolled out GB News. Each promised to steal viewers from its perceived liberal rivals with brash, social media-savvy personalities promising alternative — and hot — takes.
For Murdoch, whose forthcoming fifth wedding has attracted more attention than his Brit TV adventure, the dream of replicating the financial and cultural success of Fox News in the U.K. is rapidly decaying. At launch in 2022, some primetime shows on TalkTV registered “zero viewers” according to the British ratings agency Barb.
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