At the High Court in London on Friday, GB News won a welcome and resounding court victory against broadcasting watchdog Ofcom.
In March 2024, Ofcom ruled that then Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg had breached two rules in the broadcasting code while presenting the GB News current-affairs programme, State of the Nation. Rees-Mogg had twice briefly broken into the programme to read out, or question reporters about, urgent news flashes. Because Rees-Mogg was a sitting MP at the time, Ofcom concluded that GB News had broken a rule banning politicians from reading or reporting the news ‘in any news programmes’. It had therefore also broken the rule that insists news be ‘presented with due impartiality’.
Last week, a High Court judge quashed Ofcom’s decisions in a judicial review brought by GB News. The judge, Rowena Collins Rice, said that on a proper reading, the broadcasting code only prohibits politicians reading the news on dedicated news programmes. State of the Nation is not a dedicated news programme, so GB News hadn’t breached any rule.
It was pleasing to see Ofcom, having gone after GB News on what was a fairly narrow technicality, being defeated and put on the hook for big legal costs. But we shouldn’t cheer too loudly yet. Ofcom remains a serious threat to broadcasters’ freedom of speech.
GB News may have won a battle, but it hasn’t won the war. Ofcom has also thrown the book at it over People’s Forum, a 2024 show in which then prime minister Rishi Sunak was grilled by a random selection of sceptical Red Wall voters. Ofcom says it did not extend the same platform to other party leaders, despite GB News inviting then opposition leader Keir Starmer for a similar session, only for him to decline. As a result, Ofcom has charged the channel with a serious breach of impartiality. GB News has challenged that decision too, but whether a judge will rule in its favour this time is uncertain.
It’s increasingly clear that upstart stations like GB News get a raw deal from Ofcom. Ofcom is a mega-agency dating from 2003 and the Blair government. It is mentally wedded to the broadcasting landscape of that period, and its methods are attuned to an industry dominated by a few large stations and whose corporate management move in much the same circles as Ofcom’s higher-ups. With a board overwhelmingly made up of senior media executives, managerialists and quangocrats, Ofcom embodies the views of the metropolitan establishment.
Smaller, maverick stations that cater to populist tastes, like GB News, are alien to the world of Ofcom. The watchdog is hard-wired to respect the views of the great and the good and to look down on the audience of channels like GB News, who turn in for relief from the increasingly dreary mainstream stations.
Tellingly, a large plank of Ofcom’s attack on People’s Forum rests on the fact that it allowed Sunak to give his answers without a host spelling out the opposite point of view for the benefit of the audience. Apparently, the studio audience’s own angry criticisms and hard questions that were put to the PM didn’t count. This shows Ofcom’s contempt for the ability of ordinary people to listen to arguments and make up their own minds. In Ofcom’s book, it seems, certain audiences need to have politics explained to them by their supposed betters.
When almost everyone got their news from the evening broadcasts of one or two television stations, the case for having a body like Ofcom to ensure impartiality was just about plausible. Today, when there are an enormous number of places to get your news from, on paper and online as well as on TV and radio, Ofcom’s micromanagement of every piece of content that gets broadcast makes no sense at all. It’s an attempt on the part of an increasingly beleaguered ruling elite to prevent control over information slipping out of its hands.
Ofcom’s reaction to its defeat by GB News was predictably arrogant. It has made no admission of error. Instead it issued a statement vowing to ‘now review and consult… proposed changes to the broadcasting code to restrict politicians from presenting news in any type of programme to ensure this is clear for all broadcasters’. In other words, Ofcom’s apparatchiks have doubled down, secure in the knowledge that the government will back them. They know what’s best, after all.
It’s increasingly clear that if we want genuine free speech for broadcasters, there’s only one way to get it. Ofcom’s control over content must end. Nothing less will do.
Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.
