GB News often generates controversy over its ownership, breaches of Ofcom’s broadcasting code on issues of impartiality, and the narrow political range of presenters and guests on its programmes.
Ex-BBC presenter Andrew Neil led the launch of the channel on 13 June 2021, but left it three months later over disagreements with the senior management.
In the space of three months in 2023, Ofcom found that GB News had broken the broadcasting code three times. Opinionated presenters are key to GB News output, with their views strongly featured.
High-profile presenter issues
In September 2023, presenters Laurence Fox and Calvin Robertson were fired and Dan Wootton was suspended by the channel after comments by Fox on Dan Wootton Tonight about a female journalist which prompted 8,867 complaints to the watchdog. Wootton left GB News the day after Ofcom’s ruling on 4 March 2024, saying he would not be regulated by the ‘Ofcommunist censors’, adding: “Yesterday’s chilling Ofcom report clearly raises far bigger issues.”
Ofcom breaches and fines
Up to October 2024, Ofcom had found the broadcaster in breach of its rules 12 times since it launched. In October 2024, it fined the channel £100,000 for breaking impartiality rules with a programme featuring the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The media watchdog said Sunak was given an “uncontested platform to promote the policies and performance of his government in a period preceding the UK General Election.”
It should be noted that Ofcom’s focus on GB News came after a great deal of unhappiness about its apparent reluctance to hold GB News to account over its breaches of the broadcasting code.
Deliberately controversial coverage
Clearly, GB News wants to generate controversy in its selective coverage of topics, most recently over the Elon Musk ‘grooming gangs controversy’. This incident highlights the urgent need for impartial broadcasting of news and information, as social media becomes increasingly polarised and a source of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
CfMM report and allegations of bias
A new report by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) surmised that GB News doesn’t provide an impartial platform. The report concluded the television channel risks inciting violence “against Muslims”. It found that over two years, the channel mentioned Muslims or Islam more than 17,000 times in its output. This accounts for a staggering 50% of total mentions on British news channels.
The report states that GB News ”rarely features Muslim perspectives”, ”fails to challenge Islamophobic remarks” and portrays Muslims in the UK as a “Trojan horse” . It has an “excessive” focus on Muslims – bordering on an “obsession” – and ”regularly demonises their beliefs”.
Biased coverage of far-right riots
Significantly, the report slammed the channel’s coverage of the far-right riots which took place over the summer. The CfMM’s report found that, ”GB News accounted for 62% of all clips on UK news channels that associated Muslims with the riots and repeatedly framed Muslims as perpetrators rather than victims of violence, downplaying attacks on mosques and Muslim communities, contributing to a biased narrative”.
CfMM director Rizwana Hamid said: “Prior to GB News entering the British media landscape most of our attention was focused on the misrepresentation of Muslims and Islam in print and online publications given that Ofcom’s broadcast regulations were always more robust than the press regulator IPSO.
“However, the volume of anti-Muslim hate on GB News and Ofcom’s reluctance to regulate its harmful content has meant that politicians and commentators have been give carte blanche to malign Muslims and Islam in a way that no other channel does.”
Questions raised for Ofcom
Former ITN executive and Ofcom regulator, Stewart Purvis, said the findings raised vital questions for the broadcasting regulator Ofcom: “Has its deregulated model for broadcast news created an unintended consequence? Can a broadcaster be allowed to try to build its audience and political influence by a consistently negative portrayal of an ethnic community?”
GB News response
A GB News spokesperson responded: “This inaccurate and defamatory report is nothing more than a cynical, self-serving attempt to silence free speech. It proves exactly why a news organisation like GB News needs to exist and why it is succeeding.”
The key question posed by this serious and well-researched report is whether GB News, as it claims, is interested in free speech or does it simply wish to provoke division and dissent. The evidence would suggest the latter. In December 2024, GB News announced: ”Author, political commentator and pollster Professor Matthew Goodwin will join GB News as a permanent presenter in 2025”. Goodwin took voluntary severance from the University of Kent in 2024, following a series of controversial posts after the Southport stabbings and a GB News interview where he claimed that the protests and riots were an outlet for Britons to ”articulate their sense that there is something being lost and ‘express their voice’”.
Just a junk journalism channel?
In his excellent foreword to the CfMM report, broadcaster Gavin Esler characterises GB News as ‘junk journalism’: “No one can say definitively that a persistent diet of weird TV programmes, bizarre social media posts and unwise political statements directly provokes anyone to do anything. No one can say that if I consume ten hamburgers this week, I will suffer a heart attack. But we need to consider whether the information we consume at times is processed in ways that damage our society just as junk food damages our health.”
In the end, GB News claims to champion free speech. Critics would argue that its real aim is to stoke division and to feed off the resulting conflict. In either case, controversy drives its brand and its ratings.
A shorter version of this article was first published in Media North: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North). For more from Media North, and to subscribe to their newsletter, visit their website.
