GB News is under the spotlight again after Ofcom announced it will investigate whether the “news” channel breached broadcasting rules with a second showing of its interview with Donald Trump following complaints on the first airing that the US president’s claims about climate change, Islam and immigration had gone unchallenged.
Complaints were already made after the interview’s first airing, which the presenter Bev Turner conducted last November, however the media regulator decided not open an investigation into the original broadcast of the interview on the rightwing network’s US-based programme Late Show Live.
Ofcom has now announced it will investigate an edition of The Weekend, however, another GB News show that repeated the interview in full the next day.
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Trump was not challenged as he made a run of his usual claims that climate change was a hoax, London had no-go areas for police and parts of the UK were governed by Sharia Law.
“This programme featured an interview by GB News presenter, Bev Turner, with US president Donald Trump,” an Ofcom spokesperson said. “We are investigating whether it breached our rules on due impartiality and material misleadingness.”
Ofcom has not said why it has opened an investigation into the interview’s second showing and not the first, but it takes into account the content around an interview – such as panel discussions referring to it – as well as other context.
The Weekend was broadcast during the day in the UK, so its audience would have been higher than for the original showing of the interview, which was shown overnight.
Ofcom’s decision comes as the regulator is between chairs – Michael Grade has departed, but former Channel 4 chair Ian Cheshire has not yet formally taken up the role.
Richard Wilson, the director of the Reliable Media campaign group and a complainant about The Weekend broadcast, told The Guardian that the slow and opaque response to the interview was a case of ‘too little too late,’ and an example of regulatory failure, however: “Ofcom has quietly opened an investigation six months after the programme aired,” he said.
“In that time, GB News’s social media clips of Trump claiming climate change is a ‘hoax’ have clocked up over a hundred thousand engagements online. This is what regulatory failure looks like. Today’s announcement is welcome, but it is a direct result of sustained pressure from the public, from MPs and from civil society. The new Ofcom chair has inherited a dysfunctional regulator, and parliament must ensure he is held to account for fixing it.”
GB News, which has its commercial headquarters in Manchester, said it was “surprised and concerned” by what it described as Ofcom’s “delayed decision” over the Trump interview, pointing to the regulator’s previous decision not to pursue complaints about its original airing.
“Ofcom’s U-turn over the repeat of the interview with the US president, Donald Trump, follows adverse commentary around its original decision by prominent critics of both Ofcom and GB News,” it said in a statement. “The sequence of events inevitably raises questions around the rationale for reopening the matter at this stage. It also raises serious concerns around regulatory certainty, procedural fairness and the consistency of Ofcom’s processes.
The broadcaster added, presumably with a straight face: “GB News stands firmly by its journalism and editorial standards.”
Regular readers will be no strangers to GB News’ frequent regulatory scuffles. At one point in 2023 the right-leaning channel had 13 complaints under investigation by Ofcom underway at the same time, while last year the self-styled “People’s Channel” valiantly set itself a record challenge for the most complaints ever received by Ofcom over a comment linking homosexuality to paedophilia.
