GB News has had a good summer. Buoyed by a summer of small boat crossings and immigration protests and arrests for free speech, the People’s Channel has been nosing ahead of rivals BBC, ITV and Sky News. In August, its average views between 6 a.m. and 2 a.m. rose to 85,000, with the BBC News Channel falling to 69,000 and Sky News falling to 67,000. For a second month in a row, its daily viewers were ahead of both rivals.
GB News also boasts big political names, with Nigel Farage and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg both presenting prime-time shows, as well young talent breaking through such as investigative reporter Charlie Peters and winsome late-night presenter Patrick Christys. It covers stories where legacy broadcasters have often feared to tread – legal and illegal migration, wokery, threats to free speech – and is often forthrightly critical of a Labour government that many see as failing on all three.
It always seemed a matter of when, not if, the government would move to clip the broadcaster’s wings. This week, such agenda was let slip by culture secretary Lisa Nandy. Nandy wants GB News reined in, it seems, with her sympathies lying firmly with the ‘independent’ BBC over the ‘People’s Channel’.
Speaking to the Culture, Media and Sport committee on Wednesday, Nandy railed against what she called ‘Nigel Farage presenting news programmes on GB News’, which she says parliamentarians have raised concerns with her about. This was a revealing comment, not least because it is entirely untrue.
In fact, Neither Farage, nor any other politician, has ever presented a ‘news programme’ on GB News – doing so is against existing Ofcom rules. Politicians can present current affairs programmes, which in Ofcom guidelines are distinct from news programmes, and indeed this has long been a commonplace on the airwaves. Nandy’s conflation of the two suggests that her concern here is not the rules, but simply the fact that the Reform leader has a show at all. Notably, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and Labour’s David Lammy have presented call-in shows on LBC without Nandy – or Ofcom – crying foul.
The government ‘strongly support’ an existing move by Ofcom to tighten rules on politicians presenting news, Nandy said. Earlier this year, Ofcom had been slapped down by the High Court after it pursued GB News for alleged breaches of broadcasting rules over the simple matter of presenter Jacob Rees-Mogg reading out some breaking news during his panel show. Not to be deterred, Ofcom opted to make the rules even stricter, a change which is currently out for consultation. Worse, Nandy’s backing could well be a step towards politicians being prevented from presenting such shows altogether, which two former Ofcom executives already called for this earlier this year. Even if there isn’t an outright ban, any change which further muddies the distinction between news and current affairs will make it considerably more risky for broadcasters ever to use politicians as presenters – a especially GB News, given how tightly it is policed by Ofcom.
Nandy believes it’s GB News’s fault that fewer people trust the BBC
Nandy’s purported rationale for this crusade reveals a deeply patronising view of the British public, who she apparently thinks are too dim and suggestible to be able to distinguish news from opinion for themselves. The government must ensure there is a ‘proper framework’, so viewers can be ‘empowered to understand if what they are seeing is news or political polemic presented as news’, Nandy says. It’s worth remembering how the left tend to imagine that the only reason voters might be departing from liberal orthodoxies is that they have somehow been illicitly led astray. Many Remainers, for instance, unable to accept that Brexit voters simply had a different opinion from them, preferred to conclude that they must have been ‘misinformed’ or misled.
Many would view the rise of a new channel to compete with legacy institutions as a boon for political debate and a sign healthy media competition in the UK. Not culture commissar Nandy, for whom media plurality itself is nothing short of a threat to democracy. ‘People are reading different accounts’, she laments. This means that ‘shared spaces and [the] shared understanding that is the basis of democracy is fracturing. I think that is very, very dangerous.’ Surely the real danger to democracy here is a government minister using the state to muzzle political opponents.
As much as Nandy disdains the populist GB News, it is clear she venerates the BBC. Despite having to be grilled at length over major BBC impartiality failings in recent months, especially in its Israel-Palestine coverage, she nevertheless went to bat for the state broadcaster. Though it had ‘fallen short’ in recent months, she insisted the BBC is ‘held to the highest of standards’, whereas ‘there are different standards being observed in other places’. It was with this comment that she was pivoted from a question about the BBC’s commercial operations into her extended rant about GB News.
Extraordinarily, rather than having any problems with the state broadcaster itself, Nandy believes it’s GB News’s fault that fewer people trust the BBC these days. ‘The public have a right to know if what they’re seeing is news and is impartial, or is not’, she said. ‘And one of the challenges that then creates for public service broadcasters is that people lose trust in the news altogether.’ The logic is bizarre, not least given Ofcom’s own figures show that regular views of GB News trust the channel more than the BBC, ITV or Sky News. What is clear is that Nandy feels that GB News is making the BBC and the government sweat by disrupting the cosy liberal-establishment bias of the legacy broadcasters. In reality, broadcasters will earn the public’s trust as far as people feel they are taking seriously the issues that matter to them.
Labour, as so often, seems to think it can censor its way out of its problems. In response to unrest over migrant hotels, the Home Office launched a plan to surveil online speech; now Reform is way in front in the polls, the government wants to neuter GB News. For all the talk of ‘trust’, it doesn’t take a genius to see why Labour has GB News in its sights: this deeply unpopular government wants ban opposition politicians from the airwaves because it doesn’t like being criticised.
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