What action can GB News expect from Ofcom over Bev Turner’s fawning interview with Donald Trump, currently under investigation? Nothing at all, if its reaction to a wildly inaccurate report on civil unrest in Northern Ireland by the very same journalist is anything to go by.
The toothless media regulator has responded to hundreds of complaints about the hard right channel’s coverage of the violence in Belfast which broke out in June after a Sudanese man was charged with attempted murder in relation to a knife attack.
Cars and houses were set alight, police were attacked and families were forced to flee their homes, but Turner, host of GB News’s Late Show Live told viewers that there “weren’t riots” and no houses had been burned during the violent disorder.
“There was no riot,” she assured viewers in the immediate aftermath of the unrest. “There is not a house that has been burnt down. There are no riots.” When a guest on her show, political commentator Matthew Stadlen, pointed to actual, literal footage of cars and houses in flames, Turner replied she had seen it and it was “not that dramatic”.
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Her comments led to 446 complaints against the channel. But now Ofcom said it will not investigate the comments because Turner was challenged and had been expressing her own view about whether or not there had been a riot.
A spokesperson for the regulator said it had “carefully considered complaints about comments made by the presenter Bev Turner regarding civil unrest in Belfast”.
They added: “Taking into account that the comments reflected her personal view and received robust challenge by a guest – who referenced specific aspects of the disorder which countered the presenter’s own analysis – the programme did not raise potentially substantive issues warranting further investigation.”
As Richard Wilson, the director of campaign group Reliable Media, said: “Whether or not a house burned down is not a matter of opinion… It now looks like Ofcom has told GB News that as long as someone in the studio disagrees with you, you can say what you like about settled facts. That’s not regulation. It’s a green light.”
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Turner herself initially slightly backtracked on her claims, writing later on social media that she had been speaking in the early hours of the morning when she had been “relying on sparse footage and interpreting media descriptions”.
She wrote that she feared the disorder would be used “by the government to introduce more powers of control” and that she believed Stadlen was “priming viewers at home to accept incoming restrictions”.
Not that she should have worried, of course. Last month the regulator’s outgoing chair, Michael Grade, gave an exit interview in which he claimed GB News had done nothing wrong and other broadcasters were “embarrassed” because it covers “the agenda of the majority”.
So expect Ofcom’s investigation into Turner’s interview with Trump last November, into whether the programme breached rules on “due impartiality and material misleadingness”, to conclude that whether “London operates under sharia law” and that the capital “has no-go areas for police” – both stated as facts – were merely matters of personal opinion!
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