GB News repeatedly breached impartiality rules by allowing Tory MPs to serve as news presenters – but will not face any sanctions from Ofcom.
The broadcast regulator concluded the channel broke rules banning politicians from acting as newsreaders on five different occasions involving Conservative MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg, Esther McVey, and Philip Davies.
The trio are part of a growing cast of serving politicians who have second jobs working as presenters on the increasingly influential news service.
Ofcom said GB News’s decision to use the MPs to present breaking news coverage risked undermining the high public trust in regulated broadcast media, concluding: “We found that host politicians acted as newsreaders, news interviewers or news reporters in sequences which clearly constituted news – including reporting breaking news events – without exceptional justification. News was, therefore, not presented with due impartiality.”
Yet rather than punish GB News, which has repeatedly tested the limits of what is possible under British broadcasting rules, the media regulator has warned the channel not to break its rules again.
GB News unsuccessfully argued that the broadcasts did not break the rules because the politicians were not pretending to be impartial hosts of “news” programmes but were instead the openly opinionated presenters of “current affairs” programmes.
The difference between news and current affairs can be hard to define but they are treated in different ways by the broadcasting rules.
The channel’s bosses unsuccessfully argued that Ofcom’s interpretation of the rules was “unfair” and “dangerous”.
GB News also invoked past rulings by the European court of human rights protecting freedom of speech and said the distinction between news and non-news was “less clearcut” than acknowledged by Ofcom.
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