The real reason Ofcom has gone after GB News

I don’t envy the people who run Ofcom. On the one hand, they’re under enormous political pressure to sanction GB News, which, in the eyes of its establishment critics, is a contaminated river of far-right propaganda that’s polluting the ‘delicate and important broadcast ecology of this country’ (Adam Boulton). But on the other, they want to preserve their status as the keepers of the ring and cannot be seen to be holding GB News to a higher standard than other broadcasters. That makes their lives complicated because, in reality, the channel’s politics are far closer to the Telegraph than they are to Fox News, and it’s no more partisan than LBC or Channel 4 News. Indeed, it may actually be less politically biased than those broadcasters, with a recent poll discovering that more GB News viewers intend to vote Labour than Conservative.

Until now, Ofcom’s solution to this dilemma has been a typical English fudge in which the regulator appears to take the complaints of left-wing activists about the channel seriously, dutifully ‘investigating’ them over several months, only to conclude that it hasn’t actually breached the Broadcasting Code or – if it has – in such a minor way that it’s only deserving of a wrist-slap.