24/03/2024
The right wing news channel GB News has been described as "riding roughshod" over broadcasting laws in the UK, which are designed to defend fair access and a reasonable level of impartiality. Senior and experienced news broadcasters, many of them independent of any network, have expressed horror at the scenario where right wing politicians are interviewing their own colleagues. Others have suggested that the broadcast regulator, OFCOM, is wary of taking on GB News because the government is so intricately involved with it. Adam Boulton, the former Sky News political editor, told the Guardian that GB News is “deliberately taking the piss in terms of violating the conventions that we have grown up with in British broadcasting, of attempting to be duly impartial. Frankly, Ofcom has been supine – for understandable reasons – because it’s been clear that the government of the day is sympathetic to GB News. “What we’ve got with GB News is conservative and rightwing politicians interviewing each other, essentially a mix of softball questions to them and rightwing politics. My understanding, as someone with 40 years’ experience in broadcasting, is that that would be seen by most people as a violation of the rules.” Jon Sopel, a former BBC News chief political correspondent who spent eight years as its North America editor, said: “In the US, I witnessed the polarisation of TV, where it was not news to inform but to affirm what people already thought, and I thought that was such a dangerous road to go down … “I’m not suggesting that we have reached that point in the UK but we have had a broadcasting ecosystem where there has been a duty to uphold impartiality and to report the news fairly". One former senior ITV political news executive said: “We all assumed that we couldn’t populate shows with people overwhelmingly from one perspective. It was almost unstated that Ofcom would take a dim view if you were to cast a programme in a way that was imbalanced. But it turns out that GB News can do it, and we’ve been wrong all these years and Ofcom is relaxed about you loading the dice against one side and making a polemical programme … it’s staggering. I don’t know if that’s because the code is weaker than we thought, or if there is a perspective inside Ofcom that is more ‘let rip’ than we thought it was.” GB News is perceived to be hostile to LGBTQIA+ rights, especially trans people's rights, and has broadcast many polemical programmes against this community.
