What’s the problem with GB News, asks ex-chair of Ofcom

Grade, who left the role at the end of April after four years in the role, told website Politics Home he was now able to give his real view on the channel, which a New World investigation earlier this year showed had essentially become Reform TV, driving a coach and horses through the laws that were put in place to define broadcasting in the UK.

“I can now speak [freely], as I’m not at Ofcom,” the 83-year-old peer told the website Politics Home. “I honestly think they’re embarrassed by the fact that there is a news organisation that has a different news agenda to them, that speaks to the agenda of the majority – if you look at the polls, a large swathe of the voting population, who have no voice on the BBC.

Suggested Reading

The Daily Express, the plucky plumber and some spectacular hypocrisy

Rats in a Sack

“Immigration, Brexit, these are all issues that don’t get the weight on the BBC, or haven’t been able to, that GB News will give, so what’s the problem?”

Grade – appointed to the role by Boris Johnson in 2022 – said the “same rules apply to GB News as apply to the BBC, Sky, ITN, whoever”, telling the website: “All news programmes are the result of editorial choices made all along the line. What story are we going to cover? How are we going to cover it? Who do we interview? What are we going to ask them? What are we going to use? Where does it go in the running order?

“Everything’s a choice, all the way up. [Just] because GB News makes different editorial choices necessarily on each news day from the BBC, ITN or Sky, doesn’t make it wrong. [GB News has] actually got better and better. It’s not difficult to comply; sometimes it’s only a sentence in a script.”

The comments by Grade – who, during his time running Ofcom, presumably read its own Broadcasting Code at some point – are odd, as the criticisms of GB News are not about them picking their own news agenda. All broadcasters are free to choose which stories they want to cover.

Suggested Reading

Daily Star falls for lie of Thai AI

Rats in a Sack

The complaints about the channel are that, under the very code Grade was employed to oversee, there is an obligation to be accurate and impartial, with broadcasters required to offer appropriate challenge and context, and promote a range of viewpoints. GB News does not do that.

As Chris Banatvala, Ofcom’s founding director of standards who drafted its code and investigation procedures, told the Guardian today: “After reading hundreds of pages of Ofcom impartiality decisions, perhaps the clearest explanation for the regulator’s failures is Lord Grade’s suggestion that due impartiality can be achieved with little more than ‘a sentence in a script’.

“Grade is also wrong about the criticism of Ofcom. No one seriously argues that GB News’s editorial agenda is itself the problem. Decisions about which stories to cover have always been a matter for broadcasters, not the regulator. The evidence is now clear: Ofcom is not applying the same regulatory standards to GB News as other news services.”

When our editor-at-large Alan Rusbridger, who led the New World’s investigation into the channel, he asked its founding chairman Andrew Neil, what had allowed GB News to mutate into what it is today. “I don’t think Ofcom is very competent,” Neil said. “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.”

Turns out it was even worse than that – its chairman knew the issues, and thought that their output was simply A-OK all along!