SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: A channel constantly breaking the rules has effectively become Reform TV, while our useless state regulator does noth
...useless state regulator does nothing It has happened almost by stealth. One political party in Britain has effectively ended up with its own television station. GB News has essentially become Reform TV. The broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, has more or less given up the ghost. And Nigel Farage is laughing all the way to the bank. These are the only conclusions one can reasonably draw from the first-ever exercise in commissioning experienced professional journalists to watch multiple hours of output from GB News. The regulator, by contrast, relies on complaints from the public. And, by and large, GB News viewers have no complaints. Most of our 20 reviewers had never watched GB News before. Most of them came away appalled – not by the political views that dominate the station’s output, but by the way the channel is driving a coach and horses through the laws that were put in place to define broadcasting in the UK. The UK news ecosystem is both special and unique. Newspapers have, for 200 years, often been wildly opinionated in their approach to journalism. But parliament decided that broadcasting would be different: in return for a licence, there’s an obligation to be accurate and impartial. Broadcasters are required to offer appropriate challenge and context, and are supposed to promote a range of viewpoints. GB News routinely – you might almost say systematically – disregards these requirements. Asked to score the programmes on a scale of 0-5 (0 being not at all compliant with Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code and 5 being wholly compliant), the overall score from our reviewers was just 1.5. Each reviewer came up with detailed reasoning. Ofcom’s log of complaints, by contrast, shows a tiny trickle of concern. Of the 15 programmes we reviewed, nine had triggered no complaints, two sparked two complaints, while a kid-glove interview with Donald Trump led to 32. Two more programmes are “under assessment”.
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