Rupert Murdoch returns to British TV market, pins hopes on Piers Morgan - April 24, 2022

By Rob Harris

London: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is pinning his hopes of a successful return to the British TV news market on the star power of his former tabloid editor Piers Morgan and the professional provocateur’s ability to create worldwide controversy.

The 91-year-old executive chair of News Corp, who has been out of the sector since he sold Sky four years ago, is making his latest attempt to upset Britain’s broadcasting establishment through the UK’s newest television channel talkTV.

The station – with the brash Morgan as its star on a reputed three-year £50 million ($89 million) deal to front the daily talk show, write columns for The Sun and New York Post and publish a book with HarperCollins – will launch on April 25 in Britain on subscription and free-to-air TV as well as online platforms including Amazon, Apple TV and YouTube.

The first episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored – featuring an interview with former US president Donald Trump – has already attracted global coverage, with the pair in a seemingly confected row about deceptive editing of a promotional clip. Morgan’s program, filmed in a dedicated studio in west London, will also be broadcast on the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia from Tuesday and FOX Nation in the United States.

The venture, which has had its critics both outside and within News Corp, will draw on the journalistic talent from inside News UK’s stable of newspapers and will film its daytime schedule from the studios of Murdoch-owned sister station talkRADIO, whose presenters include Britain’s version of Jerry Springer, Jeremy Kyle. The station remains a minnow in UK talk radio ratings compared to BBC radio 4, 5 Live and LBC, with about 500,000 listeners.

The company shelved plans to create an outlet from scratch in April last year, with Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News UK, telling staff it was “not commercially viable” and the future instead lay in streaming services rather than traditional live broadcast channels.

Tom Standen-Jewell, a research analyst at Enders Analysis, said three things had changed since that decision – Murdoch had become more personally insistent that it would work, Morgan quit his top-rating ITV breakfast show Good Morning Britain over controversial comments about Meghan Markle and the online success of filming the studios of talkRADIO.

Murdoch is reported to have pushed harder for the TV channel during the UK’s COVID-19 second lockdown where he spent months at his Oxfordshire estate with wife, Jerry Hall with not enough to watch. The Australian, who founded Sky in Britain in 1989, had been weighing up a return after a failed bid to take full control of the satellite broadcaster amid outrage over the tabloid phone hacking scandal, and a second attempt became mired in regulatory difficulties.

News Corp has not disclosed how much it is spending on the project, although chief executive Robert Thomson has told investors in the Nasdaq-listed company that the station, while being “certainly impactful”, will be “low cost”.

Standen-Jewell said talkTV would quicken the pace towards more opinionated news coverage and “interpretive journalism”.

Both the pandemic and the recent war in Ukraine have sent TV news audiences soaring in Britain, which has led to commercial station ITV extending its early evening bulletin to one hour. Both Sky News and the BBC have also added more news panel shows to the daily line-ups.

Standen-Jewell said while talkTV could win older viewers cancelling their Netflix subscription amid the cost of living crisis, it would also use social media heavily in attempt to draw viewers.

“The signing of Piers is an admission that they needed a tent pole for the whole thing,” Standen-Jewell said. “He has 8 million followers on Twitter and he really is a good draw. If you study the ratings numbers he really narrowed the gap [on ITV] with the BBC in the ratings. They dropped about 20 per cent after he left and on YouTube views around 40 per cent.”

Morgan this week sought to reassure talkTV’s potential advertisers that the new station will be nothing like GB News – the right-wing station headed by former Sky News Australia boss Angelo Frangopolous – let alone a British version of Fox News.

“GB News covers from a conservative right-wing bent in the main. We certainly won’t be in prime-time. I’m certainly not right-wing. We have a different perspective, we don’t have a partisan bias to what I’m doing,” he told The Media Show on BBC.

He acknowledged that “Rupert doesn’t muck around” and if he fails his head will be on the chopping block,

“If people are tuning in in bigger numbers, if we’re dominating the social media zeitgeist in the way I did at Good Morning Britain. If we’re becoming the centre of debate in three continents then I think I’ll have done my job. If not it’ll be back to the beach for a while.”

(The Sydney Morning Herald)