Snoddy: a new rivalry born between the ‘anti-woke’ TV channels

Opinion

With Piers Morgan pulling in curious viewers to TalkTV on Monday, a battle has been provoked for the “anti-woke” audience.

The new Piers Morgan TV News Channel has been a huge initial success. The jury is still out on TalkTV.

Morgan with the help of his considerable celebrity, enormous double-page spread promotions in the Murdoch press, including a Sun wraparound cover, and a long interview with former US President Donald J. Trump managed to  attracted the curious.

Trump’s characteristic assortment of disjointed, outrageous claims and disinformation made headlines around the world and Piers Morgan’s show Uncensored romped to an audience that trumped the combined total of the BBC News channel, Sky News and GB News on the night.

His opening duel with Trump pulled in a peak audience of around 317,000 with a total of 588,000 watching on linear channels, including the repeat, while TalkTV overall attracted 809,000 viewers across its three hours of prime-time viewing.

Rather like the initial launch of Sky, Rupert Murdoch’s people produced a polished, technically accomplished launch which delivered exactly what was promised, in marked contrast to the shambolic launch of the original “anti-woke” channel GB News, which insiders say still sometimes marches to notes of chaos.

There was even a powerful roster of founding mainstream advertisers for Piers led by Toyota.

Can Morgan keep up the curious viewers coming after launch?

The numbers, though impressive, were obviously boosted by the launch night effect and were not so far ahead of the opening performance of GB News last June.

There were initial signs that not everyone hung around for long, which could be worrying if confirmed.

It would be truly remarkable if Piers Morgan, through sheer force of personality and headline-generating prowess, is able to avoid the settling down that invariably follows a launch night peak before a much lower steady state is reached.

Morgan’s next big guest is heavyweight champion Tyson Fury, or as the double-page ads in The Times and The Sun put it: “Piers Interviews The King.”

That should keep the magic going a little longer although Morgan has happily jumped on a £15m a year treadmill having to find guests of sufficient international recognition to pull in audiences in the UK, Fox Nation in the US and Sky Australia.

He also has to find time to write columns for The Sun and The New York Post while producing books for Harper Collins.

A new rivalry between the new ‘anti-woke’ TV channels

Full credit to the uncensored Piers Morgan. He got his interview with Trump despite the best efforts of GB News top dog Nigel Farage to sabotage the enterprise by giving Trump a list of hostile remarks Morgan had made about him.

A new professional rivalry has been born. The Morgan channel versus the Farage channel and in such a contest Morgan is likely to emerge the victor.

Piers got 50 minutes with Trump and lots of promotional headline material covering everything from Ukraine, Harry and Meghan to the probability of a 2024 campaign.

Morgan managed in the end to stay just the right side of respectable by challenging Trump on his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

It was squeezed out over two nights with clever editing and doubtless we will be seeing more of those clips in future.

We can be certain of one thing. Piers Morgan has used up all his political capital with Donald J. Trump and there will never be such a Morgan v Trump prize fight ever again.

Before viewers got to the Trump interview they first had to endure a 10 minute, self-indulgent rant about how Piers was going to take on “the woke brigade” while endorsing a comment by the late Shane Warne warning  “fun police get stuffed.”

Piers promised the channel would be “an island of sanity, a department of common sense.” We shall see.

Tom Newton Dunn’s News Desk programme got off to a perfectly respectable start with summaries of the day’s main stories followed up by a brisk interview with Prime Minister Boris Johnson which many saw as a rambling Johnson car  crash.

On opening night they even had a couple of decent stories of their own – the interview with the family of Aidan Aslin, the British-born soldier held by the Russians in Ukraine on the failure of Facebook to take down propaganda videos showing his illegal ritual humiliation.

Then there was the follow-up of a Sun on Sunday story alleging that Prince Andrew had “lunged” at his PA at the time 20 years ago.

These stories when then sliced and diced and chatted almost to destruction by Sharon Osbourne and guests.

What’s next for TalkTV?

So far so good for Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, but can it ever work economically as a conventional TV news channel with one big beast and a total of three hours of original programming in prime-time supplemented with a video version of TalkRadio?

No, but luckily it does not have to.

The cost and financial perils of launching innovative news channels was recently highlighted by CNN’s decision to pull the plug on its premium news streaming service CNN + after less than a month.

The decision left behind $100m in development costs, suggesting subscriber numbers were dire, although the cull may also have had something to do with the politics of merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery.

As for TalkTV Rupert Murdoch wanted to have a news channel in the UK again after the sale of Sky News and what Rupert wants Rupert gets.

As for the reported Piers Morgan £50m contract, a sum which has never been denied, Murdoch can practically make that disappear in accounting terms by dicing it up between the various parts of the empire which will be entitled to have a slice of Morgan.

There is just a chance that Murdoch may have found an innovative international model centred on a high profile, controversial journalist/ presenter.

The odds are probably against it. Piers did not go down terribly well with American audiences first time round on CNN and how well will the Australians take to the supreme confidence of a lippy Pom?

In the UK the Piers Morgan News Channel will provoke a battle for the “anti-woke” audience with GB News in which the Farage channel will come out second-best.

Not even that matters with powerful right-wing backers that GB News will endure in an era when the often modest audience for non-stop news will be super-served courtesy of the rich and powerful.

It only remains for Elon Musk to turn Twitter into a TV news channel.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays.

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