Is a British Fox News being launched? Two new 24-hour news channels are currently being studied in the United Kingdom, more or less directly inspired by the success of the American channel with its very right-wing opinion. If the plans are confirmed, the current duopoly of BBC News and Sky News, the only two British news channels, will be shaken.
Andrew Cole, the American businessman behind one of the projects, does not hide his goal: “The BBC must be broken. [Ce groupe] is shameful, a bad thing for Britain ”, he wrote recently on LinkedIn. Like a large part of the British right, he finds the public broadcasting group too connoted to the left and too politically correct.
“Appropriate accuracy”
His channel, currently called GB News, has already obtained a license from Ofcom, the audiovisual regulator, but it still has to find broadcasting agreements and put together a team. The other project, less advanced, would be concocted by the empire of Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News in the United States and of Times as well as Sun UK. Little information has been leaked about him.
However, the two newcomers will face serious difficulties. “A Fox News-style channel, made up largely of opinions, cannot exist in the UK”, says Gill Hind of Enders Analysis, a media research firm. The British audiovisual industry is, in fact, strictly regulated. Each chain must respect “Appropriate impartiality” and “Appropriate accuracy” of his information. If the fines incurred are low (a few hundred thousand euros), the license can be withdrawn. This happened in 2012 to Press TV, an Iranian news channel, three years after a problematic interview.
“However, it is simplistic to say that Fox News could not exist in the UK”, nuance David Levy, of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and former member of the board of Ofcom. The very slow process against Press TV shows the limits of the powers of the regulator. Moreover, the Russian channels RT and Chinese CGTN have licenses in the United Kingdom. Despite everything, their room for maneuver remains limited. RT was fined 200,000 pounds in 2019 for its biased coverage of several cases, including the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal.
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