I don’t envy the people who run Ofcom. On the one hand, they’re under enormous political pressure to sanction GB News, which, in the eyes of its establishment critics, is a contaminated river of far-right propaganda that’s polluting the ‘delicate and important broadcast ecology of this country’ (Adam Boulton). But on the other, they want to preserve their status as the keepers of the ring and cannot be seen to be holding GB News to a higher standard than other broadcasters. That makes their lives complicated because, in reality, the channel’s politics are far closer to the Telegraph than they are to Fox News, and it’s no more partisan than LBC or Channel 4 News. Indeed, it may actually be less politically biased than those broadcasters, with a recent poll discovering that more GB News viewers intend to vote Labour than Conservative.
Ofcom has enormous latitude when it comes to applying these rules
Until now, Ofcom’s solution to this dilemma has been a typical English fudge in which the regulator appears to take the complaints of left-wing activists about the channel seriously, dutifully ‘investigating’ them over several months, only to conclude that it hasn’t actually breached the Broadcasting Code or – if it has – in such a minor way that it’s only deserving of a wrist-slap. But that changed this week with the announcement that Ofcom is considering whether to impose a ‘statutory sanction’ on GB News, having concluded that People’s Forum: The Prime Minister,in which Rishi Sunak was grilled by a studio audience last February, broke ‘due impartiality’ rules. If it does decide to wheel out the big guns, the channel’s punishment could be anything from a fine to the removal of its broadcast licence.
Why the harsher treatment? Ofcom says it’s because this is the third time the channel has breached ‘due impartiality’ rules, that the rules in question are important (they require broadcasters to give due weight to a wide range of significant views when it comes to matters of major political controversy) and it’s incumbent upon GB News to follow these rules at the moment because we’re in a ‘period preceding a UK general election’.
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