GB News losses exceed £100 million

Losses at the radically right-wing propaganda operation GB News have soared above one hundred million pounds.

The far-right propaganda outlet GB News lost another £33 million in the 2023-34 financial year, raising the total losses to an extraordinary £105 million since it was founded in 2021.

The owners of GB News have incredibly deep pockets to bankroll their efforts to debase and destabilise UK politics by dragging Britain’s already depraved media even further to the extreme-right.

Their latest accounts show that they only made £15.8 million in revenues against operating costs over three times as high.

The majority of these revenues were generated from advertisers who are willing to actually pay money to have their products appear alongside homophobic hate-mongering, extreme-right politics, Islamophobia, apologia for looting and rioting, climate change denial, deranged conspiracy theories, misogyny, and right-wing party political broadcasts falsely dressed up as "news".

GB News has been spending more than £20 million per year on salaries, which is way more than it makes in revenues!

This largesse sends a clear message to aspiring journalists that there’s plenty of cash to be made, as long as you’re willing to contribute to the debasement of British political discourse by peddling extreme-right hate, misinformation, and conspiracy theories.

Once journalists have been radicalised by GB News, they often make their way into senior positions at conventional media organisations like the BBC.

GB News also spends vast amounts of money paying right-wing politicians lavish appearance fees, all of which adds to the outlets’ monumental losses.

Reform UK’s Richard Tice is a regular on the channel, which he describes as "The People’s Channel", which is quite an odd description given that he knows full well that it’s totally reliant on the tens of millions of pounds per year being shovelled into it by its mega-rich owners.

GB News is owned by the multi-millionaire culture war Brexiteer Paul Marshall and the Dubai-based hedge fund Legatum, while it’s CEO is the Australian former Murdoch lackey Angelos Frangopoulos.

It’s quite something to pose as "the people’s channel" of Britain, when the whole thing would be bankrupt without the largesse of an extreme-right millionaire and an overseas hedge fund.

What are the owners getting in return for the hundred million plus they’ve poured into their radically right-wing propaganda outlet?

It’s obviously not anything resembling a viable media organisation, given that its paltry revenues aren’t enough to even cover a third of its running costs.

It’d be a mistake to think that the money Marshall and Legatum are pumping into GB News is anything like a conventional capitalist investment, because the channel is so far from even breaking even, let alone generating sufficient profits to repay any of the £105 million they’ve sunk into it so far.

It’s all about reshaping the UK by driving British politics even further to the right, and if they achieve their goal of installing a radical-right government stacked with politicians with pockets full of GB News cash, they’ll be expecting legislation that’s highly favourable to the interests of mega-rich individuals and overseas hedge funds.

This kind of media loss-making is nothing new. Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda rag The S*n loses even more, having racked up over £200 million in losses between 2020 and 2023.

Look at the way Elon Musk blasted $44 billion to buy Twitter and turn it into an absolute sewer of right-wing extremism, hate-mongering, conspiracy theories, and lies. Does anyone imagine for a second that he spent that much money with the idea of making it back directly?

Capitalist media doesn’t exist to make profits directly, it exists in the form of loss-making propaganda outlets with the purpose of promoting right-wing capitalist interests.

This willingness of capitalist media moguls to sink literally hundreds of millions into their radically right-wing propaganda operations makes it extremely difficult for alternative views to compete.

Most left-wing media outlets are operated on subscriptions and donations from supporters, and shoestring budgets.

They have to break even because no billionaires or overseas hedge funds are ever going to pour millions of pounds into supporting publications that promote ideas like public ownership, financial sector regulation, investment in public services, universal rights, combatting poverty and inequality, and decent wages … because what would be their personal payoff in doing that?

Radically right-wing propaganda outlets like GB News aren’t going anywhere, no matter the absurd scale of the losses, because making money directly simply isn’t the objective, and because the owners have incredibly deep pockets to keep bankrolling them.

The only hope is that more people wake up and realise what GB News actually is, and reject this extraordinarily expensive propaganda operation aimed at brainwashing them into supporting radical right politics.