2 reviews in the sympathetic Telegraph - one gave it 1 start out of 5, the other 4:
But as it happened the sound on The Great British Breakfast was so comically bad it was often hard to hear anyone; the outside broadcasts were beset by glitches and amateurish, out-of-synch pieces to camera. The contrast with the breezily (forcefully) enthusiastic delivery of the presenters was so marked I was left hammering the volume up and down on the remote like a demented gamer.
But GB News was playing for real; breakfast time is the battleground on which any new station must fight for ratings and we were assured it would be appointment television. Truthfully the only less palatable appointment I can imagine would be a root canal. Wherever you sat on the political spectrum, this was unutterably awful; boring, repetitive and cheapskate.
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Wootton has his strengths, but with Neil having spent an hour stressing that GB News would be grown-up, responsible and level-headed, what the channel cried out for was the firmest hand on the tiller from the go. If you were unsure about GB News’s claims of impartiality, you needed Brazier or McCoy to take your hand on the first night. Wootton will have scared a few nervous horses.
He did, however, provide entertainment, and never more so than in his chaotic Zoom call with Sugar, who branded Keir Starmer a “nutter” and, when asked if he’d taken the knee, retorted: “Where would I have taken the knee? Sainsbury’s? What a stupid question.” GB News could do worse than snap Lord Sugar up as a regular.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/gb-news-launch-night-review-first-show-beset-glitches-message/Yes, those last two paragraphs are from the "4 star" review, which casts doubt on the (ludicrous) impartiality claims, and suggests the interviewee would make a better presenter. The Guardian (not surprisingly) though it was a car crash:
Now is the time to do news differently,” said Andrew Neil as GB News went live on Sunday night. “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda.” Not in the first hour you weren’t. Instead, Neil spent it introducing his new colleagues while – be still irony – indicting the woke numpties from traditional news channels stuck in the narcissistic Westminster bubble. There may have been news breaking during the hour (indeed it was scrolling on a ticker at the bottom of the screen) but it went unreported.
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When asked which three words would sum up his new employer, Oliver replied “Truth at last”. The implication, of course, was that the British Biased Corporation and Channel 4 Lies – stuffed as they are with macrame weavers so smugly PC they make Owen Jones read like Tommy Robinson – are more out of touch than people like him who have spent the most successful part of their careers having their hair impeccably conditioned at the licence fee payers’ expense. Oliver, it’s worth saying, told the Herald last weekend that lockdown was the “biggest single mistake in world history”. To be fair, Oliver had forgotten his new beard.
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The most resonant definition came from the channel’s economics and business editor, Liam Halligan. “British. Unbiased. Welcoming.” But that creates the kind of philosophical problem that comedian Andrew Doyle, presenter of GB News’s Free Nation Britain, might wish to address in his show. Can a channel that postures as unbiased correct biased coverage without itself becoming biased? Probably not. But the claim to be unbiased is risible. In the second hour, Dan Wootton railed against extending lockdown, urging that Britain should follow Texas, Florida and Sweden instead of becoming a “bio-security state copying China”. Which is not just biased but very, very silly.
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It was an utterly deadly segment, apart from when Lord Sugar had a question for one of the channel’s hosts, Apprentice winner Michelle Dewberry. “ I notice there’s been no advertisements yet. How are you going to make your revenue?” Dewberry couldn’t answer this question, because it was time to go to the body language expert. They were going to tell us whether Joe Biden really does like Boris Johnson. Which is certainly doing news differently. Or rather not doing it at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jun/13/gb-news-review-andrew-neils-alternative-bbc-utterly-deadly-stuffAnd for a "GB News" channel to not actually show the goal England scored a few hours before in the European Championships is astounding. They instead chose to have a subject to moan about - the players taking a knee before the start. It's clear it's firmly aimed at the anti-woke brigade (and it's very disappointing to see Neil Oliver among them). The BBC had a story about auctioning Barbara Windsor's Carry On Camping bra - which is
very British, but didn't provide an opportunity for moaning about "woke Britain", so GB News ignored it.
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