Its ratings and viewers have nosedived so badly that, on occasion, the official broadcasting rating agency has not registered a single viewer.
TalkTV has been struggling to attract viewers, despite the backing of billionaire Rupert Murdoch and recruitment of Piers Morgan to give the channel a boost.
Its ratings and viewers have nosedived so badly that, on occasion, the official broadcasting rating agency has not registered a single viewer.
The launch of TalkTV marked a re-entry of Murdoch’s News UK into the television news market after the company sold its stake in Sky News in 2018. Piers Morgan reportedly signed a huge deal with the channel to broadcast his primetime show on TalkTV, with a new right-wing news channel very much a personal project of Rupert Murdoch.
As Byline Times put it so succinctly, ‘Murdoch has seen an opportunity to take the anti-woke, far-right slot that GB News has failed to dominate through lack of investment, paucity of talent, and technical ineptitude’.
However, it seems that his project has so far failed.
The Guardian reports that ‘last Wednesday, Piers Morgan Uncensored, the nightly showcase of debate and un-woke opinions intended to be TalkTV’s centrepiece, was said to have attracted 24,000 people, and then lost over half of them, leaving it with an estimated audience of 10,000’.
It also reported earlier this month, that TalkTV television had been rated as having “zero viewers” during primetime broadcasts.
On one occasion, The News Desk, the channel’s hour-long political show hosted by Tom Newton Dunn, did not register a single viewer for half of its Tuesday evening broadcast.
Morgan’s flagship 8pm evening show also saw a dramatic fall in viewers from an average of 317,000 viewers on its launch night to 62,000 viewers a week later – a fall of 80%.
Rupert Murdoch’s vanity project is in trouble.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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