Ofcom

The phrase ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s something the left is better at than the right. Take the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle. Earlier this month, the CCDH held an ‘emergency’ meeting to discuss the role of social media in fuelling the public disorder that followed the murder of three girls in Southport, and on Tuesday it published the policy recommendations that emerged from that meeting. The difficulty is that ‘hate speech’ is often used by

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

Less impartial than Channel 5. That will be the headline generated by Ofcom’s latest annual report on the BBC. In fact, what the regulator’s research finds is that, over the last two years, the percentage of BBC viewers who deem the Corporation’s output ‘impartial’ has fallen from 61 to 58 per cent, while Channel 5 has driven up confidence in its impartiality from 57 to 61 per cent. Indeed, Auntie is still ‘the most-used news source in the UK’ and 70 per cent of regular viewers still say it is ‘accurate and trustworthy’. Nor does Ofcom find the Corporation’s news service breached the Broadcasting Code’s requirements for due impartiality or

At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, particularly on radio and television, that I decided to start a blog called Lockdown Sceptics. The idea was to create a platform for people who wanted to challenge the official narrative. In addition to publishing original material by Covid dissidents, many of them eminent scientists, I include links to critical papers and articles, and write daily updates commenting on the news. One of the things that puzzles the contributors is why the coverage on broadcast media has been so hopelessly one-sided. The BBC, in particular, seems to have become

In my capacity as the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, I wrote to the chief executive of Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes, on 24 April to complain about its reprimand of Eamonn Holmes. According to the regulator, the breakfast television presenter had said something that ‘could have undermined people’s trust in the views being expressed by the authorities on the Coronavirus and the advice of mainstream sources of public health information’. Holmes’s sin, in Ofcom’s eyes, was to say on ITV’s This Morning that any theory running counter to the official government line – such as the one linking 5G masts and Covid-19 – deserved to be discussed in