Fox News-style network embraces UK culture wars, will it work?

A new conservative news channel in the U.K. has been compared to Fox News. It's first week has been beset by teething problems.

LONDON -- For several months the British media have been anticipating the advent of GB News, a new conservative news channel and self-proclaimed antidote to the "metropolitan bias" of mainstream media, embodied by legacy broadcasters the BBC and Sky News. British broadcasting, unlike in the U.S., is constrained by impartiality laws. Yet the new channel's focus on pundit-led journalism, and an avowed mission statement to challenge liberal orthodoxies, represents something of a sea change in U.K. media. While the founders have largely dismissed suggestions the channel will be a British equivalent to Fox News, it is easy to see why such comparisons have been drawn by commentators. "I'm doing it because I believe the direction of news debate in Britain is increasingly woke and out of touch with the majority of its people," GB News founder and chairman Andrew Neil, a former veteran of the BBC, wrote in The Sunday Express, a tabloid, back in February. Yet since its launch last Sunday the new channel has been beset by technical problems. Anchors falling for spoof callers, the mislabelling of guests, audio issues, and correspondents in the field staring blankly into space after they are teed up by the studio -- the list of gaffes in their first week goes on.