The channel has posted a loss of \u00a342m \u2013 and that highlights my naivety. With rich backers, who cares about ratings and profit?<\/p>\n
I almost never worry about things I got wrong, unless the error was so egregious that every day brings fresh evidence of how wrong I was; so, hello, GB News. The channel is almost three years old, and it\u2019s just over three years since people started worrying about its provocations: should we be calling for an ad boycott, they wondered? My line was, relax, everyone<\/a>, and my reasons were threefold.<\/p>\n First, GB News would be boring and nobody would watch it. The thing about reactionary views is that they\u2019re nothing if not predictable. They can be incoherent, sure \u2013 and argue simultaneously that women belong in the kitchen, and that women\u2019s rights are so fundamental that transgender rights are anathema \u2013 but you can always guess which way they\u2019re going to go. Who\u2019d ever want to watch that? I was right, to a degree: the viewing figures were laughable, initially, climbing year-on-year to \u201crespectable fringe\u201d. But I was wrong on a more fundamental level, in conceiving this as regular, commercial broadcasting, whose aim is to win viewers and turn a profit. Even as its viewing numbers have climbed, financially its losses have soared<\/a> \u2013 this week, it posted an annual \u00a342m loss<\/a>, nearly 40% more than it lost last year. The one thing GB News doesn\u2019t worry about is money.<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The channel has posted a loss of \u00a342m \u2013 and that highlights my naivety. With rich backers, who cares about ratings and profit? I almost never worry about things I got wrong, unless the error was so egregious that every day brings fresh evidence of how wrong I was; so, hello, GB News. The channel … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}