Fox News is getting pulled off the air in the U.K., reports The Hollywood Reporter, after 21st Century Fox decided to stop airing the program. This ends a long-running carriage deal in Britain with pay TV giant Sky.
Fox owns a 39 percent stake in Sky. The agreement to carry Fox News was due to expire at the end of this year, reports The Hollywood Reporter. The reasoning behind the decision is because Fox News is focused on the U.S. market and designed for a U.S. audience, so it has low viewership across the U.K.
21st Century Fox said that it was not in their “commercial interest” to continue providing Fox News in the U.K.
A Sky representative said that “Sky’s customers can still enjoy a wide range of dedicated national and international news channels,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
One analyst told The Hollywood Reporter that Fox News wasn’t making any money from the U.K. feed, which was only available on Sky and not any other pay TV operators.
This decision comes before U.K. culture secretary Karen Bradley is set to give her final verdict on whether to ask Britain’s competition regulator to a launch a more in-depth investigation into Fox’s plan to take over the raining 61 percent of pay TV giant Sky, writes The Hollywood Reporter.
There have recently been various complaints against Fox News in the U.K., and the media regulator Ofcom made some rules against it. In 2015, an on-air guest suggested that the city of Birmingham was a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims. This comment was met with ridicule across the U.K., writes The Hollywood Reporter, and it was later found to be a breach of Ofcom’s broadcasting code.
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