TalkTV’s broadcast shutdown isn’t about money…

… it’s about influence and ageing. Rupert Murdoch simply found it too embarrassing.

Previously: The Enemy Within (Remix)
Rishi Sunak reheated an old 80s hit with a fascist backbeat and the opposition and most of the media joined in on backing vocals.

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Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of Rupert Murdoch buying and ruining MySpace. It’s an event that will likely pass without much attention. The pioneering social network is now a zombie website and potential nostalgia brand that’s passed through several clumsy corporate hands since News Corp off-loaded it in June 2011 for just $35 million (having paid $580 million in 2005).

But it’s worth revisiting what Murdoch called “a huge mistake” that was “mismanaged in every possible way” as another huge mistake, Talk TV, makes a tactical retreat from broadcast television towards an uncertain future as a YouTube brand and persistent social media irritant. What makes News Corp — and Murdoch in particular — tolerate some loss-making products, notably The Sun, while ruthlessly dispatching others?

In 2021, still haemorrhaging money in phone hacking settlements and wounded by the pandemic, The Sun’s value was written down to zero. Since then, it’s continued to make a loss (£127 million in its April 2023 results versus £34 million in losses for TalkTV) though stripping out legal settlements would have left it with a meagre profit of £15 million. Meanwhile Murdoch’s UK radio operation — Times Radio, TalkRadio, Talk Sport and Virgin Radio — contributed £11 million.

The Sun is growing as an online proposition, battling it out with MailOnline for the number two spot as most-read news brand behind the artificially dominant BBC website, but it’s hard to make a rational business case for its survival in print. In fact, it’s likely that Rupert Murdoch’s successor and mini-me, Lachlan Murdoch, will kill The Sun as a newspaper quicker than his father’s body can cool.

There are two reasons for The Sun’s survival in print: Nostalgia and influence. Rupert Murdoch was intimately involved — there’s a grim phrase to link with the Australian Nosferatu — with the creation of the tabloid Sun. It is a newspaper created in his image and at by his hand. The News of the World could be sacrificed at the height of the phone hacking scandal because despite its long history — it was founded in 1843 — it was something that Murdoch acquired rather than built.

On the point of influence, while The Sun has online reach, there remains a sense among a certain strain of ageing opinion-maker and lazy broadcast producer that being in print makes you a real newspaper. Since it became online-only in 2016, The Independent has had to shout far louder to get attention. Murdoch would not want to see The Sun in such a diminished position or to experience the decline in his influence that would come with it. As I wrote recently, the myth of “It was The Sun wot won it” is still strong in British politics and an online-only brand would erode that.

TalkTV’s losses were small in comparison to The Sun’s but they came with neither the heritage nostalgia nor the influence. While the channel didn’t debut with the kind of catastrophic on-air cockups as its rival GB News, it was more of an ongoing joke, like some vast whoopee cushion slowly deflating, its farting noise somehow also sounding like Piers Morgan’s mirthless hooting at his own jokes.

If TalkTV was influential, as GB News has sadly but inevitably become on the far right of the Tory Party’s most unhinged wing, Murdoch would have tolerated the losses. But it is an embarrassment, a sinking ship from which the biggest and best remunerated rat, Morgan, has already deserted. He was allowed to frame his move to YouTube as a forward-thinking decision, a visionary move, rather than a coward’s leap before the rest of the crew hit the water. Last month, he told Semafor:

I’ve just decided that I no longer want to create my show for linear television — I just want to go full digital globally. There’s something quite anachronistic about a show like mine still trying to create old fashioned TV for a pre-scheduled time slot each night for a relatively small audience — when we’re getting such gigantic audiences digitally.

He decided in the way someone given a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver decides, as someone on a glacier’s edge with a polar bear in front of them and the freezing sea decides, as someone with a badly-packed parachute in a crashing plane decides. When Morgan’s three-year deal with News Corp — reportedly worth £50 million — was announced in 2022, there was no talk of the “anachronistic” nature of “old-fashioned TV”. No, Morgan boasted:

I’m delighted to now be returning to live television with a new primetime show whose main purpose will be to cancel the cancel culture, which has infected societies around the world.

Morgan and TalkTV were cancelled by indifference and a “billionaire tyrant” — as ol’ Rupert described himself in one of his Simpsons cameos — tired of such an expensive embarrassment. When I reviewed TalkTV’s first night in April 2022 — yes, despite the rounding up in news reports, the channel didn’t make it to two years as a broadcast proposition — I wrote:

In the early moments of the first episode of his TalkTV show …Uncensored, Piers Morgan read quotes on free speech from Winston Churchill, George Washington, and Christopher Hitchens. But the entire programme was against the sentiment of another popular quote by Hitchens: “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.”

His schtick is boring. Not offensive. Not edgy. Not triggering. But boring. At the beginning of the first of several monologues, a grab-bag of his familiar obsessions (‘wokeness’, ‘cancel culture’, Meghan and Harry, ‘cancel culture’, ‘illiberal liberals’, trans sportspeople, and anger that Mr Potatohead doesn’t have lifelike human genitalia) a trigger warning flashed in the corner of the screen… 

The onscreen graphics suggested someone in the production team considers The Day Today and BrassEye to be educational material. At one point, Morgan buried his head in his hands and the slogan “the world’s gone nuts” appeared beside him rendered in a font that recalled messing around with ClipArt at school. The vibe was very much ‘man pisses himself for attention on an early-2000s Fox News set’.

In the months since then, TalkTV has been through several relaunches, refreshes, and reboots but the same problem remained: It was boring. The audience for a diet of faux controversy, culture war red meat, and reheated right-wing tropes is relatively small and it was captured by the more genuinely unhinged GB News.

GB News is also losing money — up 38 percent to £42.4 million for a total deficit so far of £76 million — but it’s a hobby project for the billionaire Sir Paul Marshall, who wants to build his own influence empire and is willing to suffer the pain to get it. The difference between TalkTV and GB News is that the former did nothing to increase or bolster Murdoch’s political influence while the latter has made Marshall a player.

The future of TalkTV is to wither away as an online brand, replaced with Sun TV once the shame is not too acute. Piers Morgan will go entirely independent once his deal expires before finding a berth with some other desperate broadcaster. News Corp needs to make it broadcast projects work as its newspapers continue to decline, but TalkTV was a mistake from the start. It was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist, with a cavalcade of charmless presenters fronting unwatchable shows.

In time, TalkTV will be filed away with MySpace as “a huge mistake”, a fundamental misunderstanding of the market from a company still beholden to the desires of an ageing emperor whose most dynamic move in decades was selling off most of his empire to Disney.

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