Screen scandal: How Ofcom lets GB News get away with it

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”. 

So far, there has been no action in regard to any of these complaints. The Trump interview, which both our reviewers scored zero for compliance, was waved through on the grounds that some of Trump’s lies and inaccuracies were later challenged by guests during the evening show, in the early hours of the morning in the UK. 

The virtual absence of complaints about the flagship evening shows suggests that the GB News audience is comfortable with what it’s getting and unlikely to raise concerns. In one poll run by Reform UK candidate and GB News presenter Matt Goodwin, a remarkable 97% of viewers agreed with Donald Trump’s statement that Europe had become “unrecognisable”. Even in Pyongyang, such a poll would raise eyebrows. 

The New World assembled a team of 20 journalists to assess 15 hours of prime-time GB News shows from January, as well as the Trump interview, which led to 65,000 people signing a petition for Ofcom to censure. 

Each programme was assessed by two different reviewers. They found numerous glaring breaches of impartiality; a widespread disregard for accuracy; a predominant framing of news in ways that overlap with Reform’s political agenda; a systemic use of Reform politicians, candidates and supporters; and an overwhelmingly right wing bias in choice of guests and issues. 

The team of reviewers comprised professional journalists with extensive experience across newspapers, magazines and broadcasters. They include roles on the Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator, the Times, the Observer, the Daily Mirror, Granada TV, ITV News, BBC News, the Daily Mail, the Article, Prospect magazine, the Economist, the Guardian, Archant, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, Tortoise Media and GQ. Some also had experience in regulation, academia and promoting ethical standards in journalism. 

One wrote of Nigel Farage’s evening show: “This programme is Farage propaganda dressed up as a panel show.” Another wrote of a programme presented by Reform politician Matt Goodwin: “Absolutely did not comply. It was one man’s rant against immigration, supported by compliant and affirmative opinions and a pretence of an opposing view that was shut down rapidly. It was a disgrace.”

Farage, it hardly needs emphasising, is the leader of a political party that is currently leading in the opinion polls, with some political experts speculating that Reform could even form, or be part of, the next government. It is unprecedented for a political leader to be given their own news and current affairs programme on British television.

Since becoming an MP in July 2024, Farage has declared a remarkable £585,000 in fees from GB News, up to December 2025. In addition, his company holds nearly half a million GB News shares, which could amount to a 2% holding.

A highly experienced, award-winning journalist who has worked in newspapers and TV wrote of Bev Turner’s Trump interview in November 2025: “The programme could not possibly comply with Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code. (Trump’s) seriously false or contentious factual statements were never challenged or corrected at any point. The presenter was… not at all impartial. This was public relations, aka propaganda, masquerading as news.”

Another reviewer, who has worked at the highest level in a variety of publications, wrote of the same programme: “No reasonable person could regard this interview as journalistic in character… it is an exercise in regime-compliant propaganda that barely bothers to present itself as reporting.”

The interview is available on YouTube (“Donald Trump blasts CORRUPT BBC”) and multiple excerpts were used on GB News’s social media feeds, which reach millions of people (GB News claims 10 million followers on social media, with a staggering 2.6 bn video views and streams in 2025.) But Ofcom decided the programme was fine on the basis that – in the middle of the night, UK time – some of Trump’s more egregious assertions were challenged by guests.

Chris Banatvala, who was Ofcom’s founding director of standards responsible for drafting and enforcing its first broadcasting code, told me he considered the programme “the most nakedly partial interview I think I’ve ever seen.”

When news broke that Ofcom had decided to give it a clean bill of health, he said: “This was a test case for how Ofcom regulates broadcasters on due impartiality. It has failed that test. The decision raises serious questions about whether Ofcom is willing to enforce its own standards as set out in legislation. It now appears that Ofcom has abandoned any pretence that meaningful regulation of broadcast content is still being maintained.”

Ofcom promised The New World an interview to talk about its regulation of GB News. Once we sent them a full list of the programmes under scrutiny, the publicly funded regulator changed its mind. Three days after confirming an interview, they wrote: “I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to make this work.” 

GB News was launched in June 2021. It went live on the evening of June 13 with a glitch-plagued special programme hosted by its first chairman, Andrew Neil. The main backers were Sir Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager who also started UnHerd and subsequently bought the Spectator, and the Dubai-based Legatum Group. Sir Robbie Gibb, former spin doctor to Theresa May, was an editorial adviser. 

Marshall says he spotted a “huge blank space for a news channel on the centre right, or even just the commonsense centre ground.” He wanted the channel to combat conspiracy theories and promised that GB News would have a “golden thread of responsibility and accountability…. we all need to hold ourselves to a high standard of responsibility, which means a dedication to telling the truth as far as we see it.”

Neil had been heavily involved from the start. “The channel was predicated on the view that all the existing broadcasters were various shades of left,” he told me. “It was a largely collectivist mindset with liberal metropolitan values and assumptions.

“My idea was to provide a corrective which would come from the centre, centre right, and would look at events in a different way, but still within the Overton window of a pro-market economy view of the world.

“So not every question would begin to a government minister, ‘Why are you not spending more money on this?’ Or ‘Why is the government not doing something about that?’ Not every problem would be analysed through the prism of the government as the source of all solutions to our ills.” 

Neil says the investors consistently assured him that they did not want to do “a Fox News.” He adds: “It turned out, of course, to be an entirely false prospectus. Actually, they really did want a kind of Fox News. They were above all rabid Brexiteers, and that still motivated them. They worshipped the ground that Nigel Farage walked on.”

Neil set about hiring a mix of presenters from the centre left and centre right. By the end of 2020, the launch money had been raised, and it became clear to Neil that the owners had a very different vision for the channel.

He rejected suggestions that Nigel Farage should be part of the launch line-up. “I would never have politicians presenting programmes,” he says. “I’m just baffled as to why Ofcom allows it.”

He says that, in the run-up to the launch, key players wanted to do a series on the “Guilty Men of Brexit” – figures such as Nick Clegg, Keir Starmer and Michael Heseltine. At another meeting, it was suggested that GB News should put secret cameras in a classroom to expose left wing bias. The idea was dropped when it was pointed out that this would be illegal. 

Neil decided he could not stay at the channel and negotiated an exit within weeks of the launch. He has watched with some dismay as GB News has turned into something very different from how he originally conceived it. 

“Just as Fox basically became the channel of Donald Trump, it’s clear they have turned GB News into the Reform channel,” he says. “I think they see themselves as in the vanguard of the Reform movement, and in a way, the politics has worked to their advantage.”

‘I would never have politicians presenting programmes. I’m just baffled as to why Ofcom allows it’

ANDREW NEIL
FOUNDING CHAIRMAN, GB NEWS

So why has Ofcom allowed GB News to mutate into what it is today? “I don’t think Ofcom is very competent,” he says. “I don’t think they’re across the issues. I think they’re too big and bureaucratic, and I don’t think they understand the world that they’re in now.”

For a while, once Neil left, GB News became a home for a range of iconoclastic oddballs. The former TV historian Neil Oliver (“the alleged climate crisis is the most expensive and devastating lie of all time”) claimed a “silent war” was being waged to take “total control of the people” and impose a “one-world government”.

He insists Covid vaccines caused “turbo cancer”, a disease that is unrecognised by medical authorities. He is still with GB News, but his show airs first on YouTube, which Ofcom does not regulate. 

Former showbiz presenter Dan Wootton was also hired – and subsequently fired. Following complaints about his off-screen behaviour, he warned: “There are dark forces out to try and take this brilliant channel down… because GB News is the biggest threat to the establishment in decades, and they will stop at nothing to destroy us.” He is certain that there is a “great reset” or globalist plot and that the Covid lockdowns were a deliberate “psychological operation” to instil fear and control the population. 

Wootton was suspended for misogynistic comments on a GB News show fronted by the actor-turned-libertarian activist Laurence Fox. Fox had been given a regular Friday night show after founding a new right wing political party, the Reclaim Party, largely financed (to the tune of £4.2m) by the Brexit backer Jeremy Hosking, who has also given nearly £2m to Reform. Fox has said, “We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain.”

An oddball right wing “priest” called Calvin Robinson was also given his own show before he, too, was sacked for supporting Fox. Robinson, who belonged to four different denominations in four years, regularly fulminates about the evils of Islam and was sacked from a parish in Michigan, in the US, for “toying with antisemitism”.

Quite how any of these misfits fitted into Marshall’s mission to stamp out conspiracy is uncertain. Ofcom, asked to rule on Oliver’s claims about “turbo cancer”, decided that freedom of expression trumped actual medical evidence. 

Meanwhile, GB News was busy hiring a line-up of more overtly political presenters, who overwhelmingly came from right wing backgrounds. Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Darren Grimes, Richard Tice and Matt Goodwin are all Reform politicians. There were four current or former Conservative MPs from the right of the party (Jacob Rees-Mogg, Miriam Cates, Philip Davies and Esther McVey). In all, seven sitting MPs have been allowed to present programmes regularly, none of them from the left or centre left. 

Then there was a platoon of journalist-presenters, several of whom were associated with right wing political parties or causes. Martin Daubney, who often stands in for Farage, was a Brexit MEP before becoming deputy leader of Fox’s Reclaim Party in 2021. Michelle Dewberry, who has her own evening show, is a former Brexit Party candidate. Tom Harwood was a pro-Brexit activist and unsuccessful Conservative candidate. Bev Turner has attacked “MSM weather fear-porn” and, like her fellow presenter Neil Oliver, she is something of a vaccine-sceptic. No GB News executive could argue with a straight face that this line-up (even with the barely measurable ballast of former Labour MP Gloria di Piero) was balanced. Nor could they argue that, like the BBC, presenters are required to leave their politics at the front door. On the contrary, GB News devised a format – a blend of news and discussion – in which the presenters are very much required to speak their mind.

The typical format for a GB News evening show runs something like this. The presenter tops the programme with a few minutes of their own trenchant views, which generally align with the talking points of the Farage-led Reform Party or the right of the Tory Party. There will be four or five segments of “news”, which, again, overwhelmingly reflect the obsessions of one party – Reform. And a handpicked panel of guests will discuss the issues, often without even a semblance of balance or challenge. 

Ofcom has spent some time and legal fees arguing whether this format amounts to “news” or “current affairs”. In truth, it’s an uneasy mix of both. There are news bulletins and an agenda that broadly reflect the issues of the day. But it’s important to stress that the very act of deciding what is “news” on a particular day is itself a political choice. 

If, night after night, your presenters choose to talk about migration rather than, say, child poverty, trade or climate change, that is itself a far from impartial act.  Your framing of the issues facing Britain could, in other words, exactly coincide with the obsessions of Nigel Farage while masquerading as “news”. This is not how any British broadcaster has ever worked. 

Our reviewers found that the guests or “experts” are predominantly drawn from a pool of right wing commentators, politicians, polling organisations, or think tanks. The supposedly counterbalancing minority voices often have little real stature or expertise and are challenged or interrupted much more than the guests who agree with the presenter’s views. An unheard-of Labour councillor from North East Derbyshire might, for instance, be put up against a Reform big hitter. 

Take one particularly egregious programme – the Matt Goodwin show broadcast on January 23, which discussed the forthcoming by-election in Gorton and Denton, in which, just four days later, Goodwin himself would announce he was standing as the Reform candidate (Ofcom says it is looking into three complaints about this matter). 

Aside from the by-election discussion (in which Goodwin mocked the left and predicted Reform could win), nearly all the subjects he chose to discuss were in some way related to illegal migration. 

The issues he chose were: a) Is Europe falling apart and becoming unrecognisable? b) What is the risk of Islamist fighters arriving on small boats? c) Why are Crowborough residents up in arms over a local camp for asylum seekers (aka “illegal migrants”)? And d) Sexual assaults by refugees in the Netherlands and the UK. All of these are Reform talking points that he obsessively writes about on his personal Substack. There was a short additional discussion about the Chagos Islands dispute. 

Including Goodwin, the balance of voices was 5-1 in favour of the right/Reform side of the argument. The guests included a right wing journalist from the Telegraph; a former Brexit MEP; a journalist with Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic website; and an angry protester from Crowborough who didn’t want “illegal migrants” housed in the town. 

The only counterpoising voice was a public relations consultant called Cai Wilshaw, who regularly appears on GB News as the “left voice”. He was interrupted and shut down by Goodwin in a way that pro-Goodwin guests weren’t. He admitted he didn’t know much about the Chagos controversy. 

‘[The Trump interview] was the most nakedly partial interview I think I’ve ever seen’

CHRIS BANATVALA
FOUNDING DIRECTOR, OFCOM

There was no real attempt at balance or impartiality and barely any interest in allowing views Goodwin didn’t agree with. As for accuracy, there was a particularly contentious segment in which former Brexit MEP James Glancy was allowed to make a series of untrue statements about the proportion of non-white people in Europe.

Of the German city of Essen, he said: “There aren’t any Germans when you walk around the city… it’s full of immigrants. And that’s the same that’s happened to British cities and other cities like Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, where the European white population have become minorities. We’ve seen this in Luton, we see this in London now… there’s no consent for mass replacement immigration.” Goodwin responded simply by saying, “Sure.” 

Glancy said there were many European capital cities that were “majority-minority”. But none of this is true. Migrants make up 37.1% in Amsterdam, 32.3% in Rotterdam, and 40.6% in London. For Luton, the migrant figure is 38%. For Antwerp, there are no comparable official figures on colour, but 44% of the population was born abroad.

Goodwin made no attempt to challenge or correct Glancy, nor pick him up on the controversial term “replacement immigration”: it was obvious he agreed with him. 

Ofcom’s statement to TNW said: “Our rules around due impartiality and due accuracy in news are cornerstones of the Broadcasting Code. They ensure that audiences are not misled and that they are exposed to an appropriate range of alternative views and perspectives.” None of this happened with the Goodwin programme. 

When it came to the Crowborough segment, Goodwin allowed a protester named John le Wechner to rant about the threat “illegal migrants” might pose to locals. We were given no information about him, any more than Jacob Rees-Mogg did in introducing another Crowborough voice, one Nick Jones, the following evening. 

A modicum of research would have unearthed that Jones is a conspiracy theorist who believes Keir Starmer is “a puppetician being controlled by BlackRock”. (Even TalkTV balked at that.) Rees-Mogg ended his interview saying: “I wish you every success in your campaign against this terrible imposition.”

On Goodwin’s programme, the Telegraph journalist Poppy Coburn mocked “the utterly useless local Green MP, Rachel Millward” for supposedly saying she was concerned for the safety of migrants. But Millward is not the local MP: that’s the Conservative Nusrat Ghani. Millward is the local council leader and has opposed the government’s plans. There was no correction of Coburn’s remarks. The Crowborough resident’s tirade was clipped and promoted through GB News social media channels. 

What is going on at Ofcom? Two experts who have worked there, Stewart Purvis and Chris Banatvala, argue that the regulator has increasingly spent its energy identifying narrow “technical breaches” rather than addressing the core issue of whether GB News complies with the law on impartiality. “This obligation is the cornerstone upon which the British public’s trust in regulated broadcast journalism has been built,” they wrote, adding that it was “a trust which far exceeds that of any other media.”

To see how far Ofcom has journeyed in the way it operates, it’s worth revisiting a meticulously argued 12-page adjudication it published just eight years ago, which found that the BBC had breached its duty of due accuracy in 2017 by failing to challenge Nigel Lawson’s remarks on the science of climate change on the Today programme. 

Something has changed. Ofcom now has nothing to say about a GB News presenter, Bev Turner, failing to challenge Donald Trump when he told her that climate change was a hoax, and that China does not use wind power. Rather than challenge these lies, Turner merely responded: “It takes real courage to stand up at the UN and drop so many truth bombs… It was a joy to watch.” Explaining why Turner’s lack of challenge was no breach, Ofcom said the overall coverage “was within audience expectations for a current affairs programme”. Whatever that means. 

In five years, from 2020 to 2025, there were 1,221 complaints to Ofcom about climate misinformation. Not one resulted in an upheld breach. Asked by peers why this was, Laura Rhea, Ofcom’s director, standards & audience protection, told MPs that it was probably because broadcasters were “complying broadly with our rules”.

This would be a surprise to environmental activists, who have logged multiple examples where they say GB News has given a platform to hundreds of anti-climate attacks. The campaign group Stop Funding Heat has submitted 46 complaints to Ofcom over GB News’s climate coverage in 2024-25, none of which have been successful.

The political neutrality of Ofcom was called into question when the Boris Johnson government tried to insert the “unappointable” former Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, as chair. When that failed, assorted Tory plotters, including Robbie Gibb, tried their best to lobby for the appointment of one Lord Gilbert, described as a “long-standing Conservative Party apparatchik”. Eventually, after a two-year hiatus, the job went to Tory peer Lord Grade, then 79. 

Whether Ofcom’s leadership has decided on a softer approach to regulating GB News after a few very expensive legal skirmishes in the courts it is hard to say – particularly as Ofcom has decided to refuse an interview. Says Banatvala: “Having worked there for eight years I genuinely cannot work out what their mentality is, other than they’ve gone so far, it’s now really difficult to step back.”

GB News has lost its backers more than £100m since its launch but insists it is “firmly on track” to become the UK’s biggest news channel by 2028 – the probable year of the next general election. 

It seems set on a course in which, with Ofcom appearing to turn a blind eye, it will pay the barest lip service to the rules supposedly governing broadcasting in this country. The point hardly needs to be made that – were its politics different – the outcry would be deafening. If any regulated broadcaster had a roster of left wing Labour, Green Party, SNP and Sinn Féin presenters pushing their agenda night after night, there would be uproar. 

So Michelle Dewberry can keep asking soft questions of Reform chief Zia Yusuf. Suella Braverman can be guaranteed a gentle ride. Patrick Christys can continue to mock the Labour government and pack his panel with right wing guests. Ben Leo can rant about immigration and spout White House propaganda. Nigel Farage can carry on picking up £6,000 an episode for promoting Reform talking points.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, no one’s going to mind if you end a segment on abortion by asking viewers to “pray for the souls of holy innocents… who were killed unborn in 2023”.

Matt Goodwin, having failed to become a Reform MP, can carry on, unchallenged, with his obsession about what Muslims are up to in Britain. No matter whether it’s true or not. 

Bev Turner is free to utter, or nod through, outright lies. Martin Daubney, no one’s going to judge you if you get facts wrong or say things like: “I love the smell of Brexit, especially on a Monday”.

All Reform politicians: keep showing up, you know it will be a walk in the park. And Liz Truss will continue to assert that “we need more GB News”. 

Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, has told MPs: “The public have a right to know whether what they are watching is news and is impartial, or whether it is political polemic.” She speaks of her expectation that broadcasters must meet the “highest standards of accuracy and impartiality”.

But who’s checking? Clean information is, in theory, as precious as clean water. We know what happened to water in this country. Is our national news going the same way?

Alan Rusbridger is an editor-at-large at The New World. He was editor-in-chief of the Guardian from 1995 to 2015, and of Prospect magazine from 2022 to 2025