GB News: The £76 million propaganda factory

GB News has racked up an astonishing £76 million in losses against tiny revenues, but that's the price the owners are willing to pay to corrupt British political discourse.

GB News made a vast £42.4 million in losses in the 2022-23 period which is up from the £30.6 million they lost in their first full year of operation.

These whopping losses mean they’re down £76 million since they were founded, and owe their creditors over £87 million!

These enormous losses are even more incredible in the context of their comparatively tiny revenues of £3.6 million and £7.6 million for the years in question.

The fact GB News is running at such extraordinary losses means that they’re not paying any tax.

GB News boast in their accounts about their rapid growth in online activity, citing use of their website and app, and increased follower counts on their social media profiles, but all this proves is that it’s possible to buy some online success if you’ve got literally tens of £millions per year to throw at it, and no tax to pay on such an absurd loss-making operation.

GB News aren’t just blatantly buying online engagement and dodging the tax man, they’re also running rings around the impotent and inept broadcast regulator.

They’ve paid a whopping £660,000 to Tory politicians since their launch in 2021, while only paying £1,100 to Labour MPs in two one-off appearance fees in the same period.

GB News is becoming notorious for the absurd spectacle of Tory MPs pretending to be presenters interviewing Tory ministers about Tory policies, as if this constitutes "news" rather than billionaire-bankrolled Tory propaganda.

In 2022-23 GB News paid out a whopping £21.2 million in wages while only making £6.7 million in revenues!

Any other business paying over three times their total revenues out in wages alone would be functionally bankrupt, but the GB News owners have incredibly deep pockets, amounting to £83.8 million they’ve spent bankrolling their extreme-right propaganda factory so far.

This absolute reliance on dodgy owners and their ludicrous 3:1 ratio between pay and revenues is so absurd that it makes football look like a sane and sustainable business model!

When it comes to the propaganda factory’s output there’s all the conspiracy theories, hateful extreme-right rabble rousing, brazenly biased coverage, authoritarian hankering, culture-war grifting, and the scandalous behaviour of GB News employees like Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton.

Aside from the blatant Tory propaganda and toxic extreme-right politics, there’s also the glaring conflict of interests of GB News presenters shilling for the interests of the channel’s owners.

When GB News "presenters" like Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg have railed against the proposed acquisition of the Telegraph and Spectator by a United Arab Emirates backed consortium (link - paywalled), it’s clearly beneficial to GB News owner Paul Marshall who is considering a rival bid for the right-wing print outlets if the UAE takeover can be blocked.

It’s absurd that Tory MPs on the GB News payroll can demand that the unelected House of Lords to bring in legislation to block a UAE acquisition, while a GB News owner who bankrolls their absurdly over-inflated wages waits in the wings to launch a rival bid, and nobody’s calling conflict of interests.

Paul Marshall was recently caught up in a social media scandal after he was found to be liking and promoting vile bigotry and extreme-right content on his Xitter profile.

It’s bad enough that someone who has clearly been radicalised by the extreme-right is already running a vast right-wing propaganda operation, but it’s truly obscene that employees of his far-right propaganda factory are using their political influence to improve his chances of taking over another UK media operation.

Marshall’s GB News co-owners are the UAE-based investment fund Legatum operated by the New Zealand billionaire Cristopher Chandler.

It’s interesting how all these Tory MPs on the GB News payroll are fine with a New Zealander based out of the UAE buying malign influence over British politics by pumping tens of £millions per year into the loss-making propaganda factory that pays Tory MPs ridiculous six figure salaries for pretending to be news presenters, but outraged at the idea of the UAE taking control of a newspaper and a low-circulation hard-right propaganda magazine!

GB News fans will probably resort to claiming that this kind of criticism is motivated by jealously at the channel’s "success", but success is relative.

It’s actually surprising that they’ve only managed to gather 2.5 million social media follows (not differentiating between the same individuals following GB News across multiple platforms) after they’ve lost £76 million bankrolling their loss-making operation so far.

They can’t point to their pitiful broadcast ratings to claim success, so they’re trying to hype up their digital presence. However picking up 2.5 million follows after £76 million in losses suggests that each and every one of the follows they’re boasting about as a core success indicator came at a cost of £30 each!

It’s utterly obscene that a radicalised right-wing rich boy like Paul Marshall and an overseas billionaire like Christopher Chandler can simply buy influence over British political discourse by setting up a loss-making, tax-free, extreme-right propaganda factory, and then paying obscene salaries to Tory MPs to pretend to be news presenters while they blatantly shill for their paymasters’ interests in the corridors of power.