Ofcom today announced it will, after all, investigate GB News for breaches of UK broadcasting law following The New World’s investigation into the broadcaster last month.
Our investigation, led by editor-at-large Alan Rusbridger and headlined “Screen scandal: How Ofcom lets GB News get away with it”, clearly demonstrated how GB News has effectively become Reform TV and regularly failed in its obligations to due impartiality and due accuracy.
We found swathes of GB News output mirroring Reform’s anti-immigrant agenda and a number of presenters having overt links to the political party.
Now, having initially declined to investigate GB News, Ofcom has reversed its decision and announced Bev Turner’s interview with Donald Trump on November 15 will be examined, to determine whether the programme breached rules on “due impartiality and material misleadingness”.
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In the interview, Trump claimed climate change was “a hoax”, that London operated under sharia law, and that the capital had no-go areas for police – none of which Turner challenged. On the contrary, she told the president it took “real courage to stand up at the UN and drop so many truth bombs.”
Ofcom’s U-turn comes after a period of sustained pressure on the TV channel. Leader of the Liberal Democrats Sir Ed Davey raised The New World’s investigation in a question to Keir Starmer at PMQs.
The New World‘s investigation assembled a team of 20 professional journalists to assess 15 hours of GB News prime-time output. Their verdict was damning: GB News has effectively become Reform TV, systematically driving a coach and horses through the broadcasting laws that every other licensed broadcaster is required to obey.
“No reasonable person could regard this interview as journalistic in character,” one reviewer wrote. “It is an exercise in regime-compliant propaganda that barely bothers to present itself as reporting.”
Ofcom had previously cleared the midnight broadcast of the same interview in February, arguing that some of Trump’s claims were later challenged by guests in the small hours of the morning. The New World’s investigation made a mockery of that defence.
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Chris Banatvala, the man who wrote Ofcom’s original broadcasting code, pulled no punches. He told Rusbridger that the Bev Turner Trump interview was “the most nakedly partial interview I think I’ve ever seen.” When Ofcom first cleared it, he declared the regulator had “abandoned any pretence that meaningful regulation of broadcast content is still being maintained.”
In a statement today, GB News – which has previously had its lawyers send warning letters to The New World – today conceded that our investigation had provoked this reversal, saying it “follows adverse commentary around its original decision by prominent critics of both Ofcom and GB News… inevitably raising questions around the rationale for reopening the matter.”
The full Alan Rusbridger investigation is available to read for free here.
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