The toughest job facing the new head of Ofcom: tackling the blatantly partisan GB News | Polly Toynbee

4 hours ago 3

Labour feels more sure-footed. A stronger sense of its own identity flows from standing up to Donald Trump, his war and his insults. MPs are less often looking over their shoulders at the right and its media.

Here comes one test. Selecting a new chair of the media regulator Ofcom is in its final phase: which of two reported frontrunners is appointed will reveal the government’s frame of mind. Ofcom has been moribund, weak to the point of invisibility. One key area is the regulation of online harms, as the government seeks to toughen up on the safety of children and the sanity of the nation, against a libertarian right that defends aggressive notions of free speech, and permits fact-free dangers, such as vaccine and climate denial. Kemi Badenoch is a free-speecher who argued for the weakening of the Online Safety Act in 2022 by removing the ban on “legal but harmful” material for adults, claiming it was “legislating for hurt feelings”. Keir Starmer is strengthening the law by banning addictive algorithms.

In the blue corner is Conservative MP Jeremy Wright, former attorney general and, for a year, secretary for digital, culture, media and sport, where he produced a white paper on online harms. He has followed through, calling for that act’s better implementation by Ofcom, working with other campaigners. He would be a reasonable regulator – for a Conservative government.

In the red corner is Margaret Hodge, who as chair of the public accounts committee pursued the great online monopolies, their untouchable power and tax avoidance. Hodge accused the likes of Amazon of logging their UK sales in low-tax countries. She seized on Google’s then (now abandoned) motto “Don’t be evil” when she told Google’s European chief executive “I think you do do evil”. That man was Matt Brittin, newly appointed director general of the BBC, which Ofcom regulates: that’s just one of life’s coincidences. Hodge took on the powerful but also shook up a complacent culture where HMRC and regulators failed to enforce laws.

Tory governments always appoint their own: Labour likes to seem less partisan, appeasing Tory press critics. But this is no time for such nicety. Remember that the Tories fought to appoint former Telegraph editor Charles Moore to chair the BBC and the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre to lead Ofcom, finally selecting anti-licence fee BBC enemy Michael Grade.

Here’s the new chair’s hardest political task: tackling Ofcom’s abysmal failure to prevent GB News becoming Reform News, contrary to every intention and spirit of broadcasting impartiality laws. That needs exceptional bravery and the sharpest political teeth.

Try to imagine the revolt on the right if Labour sanctioned an upstart broadcaster with, say, George Galloway as its main nightly presenter (he’d be as good at it as Nigel Farage), a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes. Beyond that scenario, it’s hard to devise a leftist channel as aggressively poisonous as GB News, which pours out Farage, Matt Goodwin, Lee Anderson, Darren Grimes, Martin Daubney and Richard Tice, and is frequently accused of breaking rules about accuracy and impartiality.

That outrage should be fired up by Alan Rusbridger’s deep investigation (published in the New World), Screen scandal: How Ofcom lets GB News get away with it. A 20-strong team of senior journalists from across the political spectrum studied GB News programmes and scored them for compliance with the Ofcom code: the overall score was 1.5 out of 5. Particularly notorious was Bev Turner’s interview with Donald Trump, which never questioned his claim that climate change was a hoax, and China does not use wind power. Instead she lavished praise on him: “It takes real courage to stand up at the UN and drop so many truth bombs … It was a joy to watch.” Ofcom’s response to complaints claimed overall coverage “was within audience expectations for a current affairs programme”.

Even Andrew Neil (check his X posts for his rightism) found GB News too much, ducking out in its early days. Rusbridger quotes him on assurances this would not be a Fox News: “It turned out, of course, to be an entirely false prospectus. Actually, they really did want a kind of Fox News. They were above all rabid Brexiteers, and that still motivated them. They worshipped the ground that Nigel Farage walked on.”

Broadcasting impartiality law was passed in 1954 as commercial broadcasting arrived, to prevent it following the newspaper path. A politically driven, mainly rightwing press has always dominated British life and politics. Now DMG Media, News UK and Reach control 90% of UK national newspaper circulation. Impartiality law worked: Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, was prevented by regulation from Foxifying his Sky News. Why didn’t Ofcom prevent GB News becoming the voice of the hard right?

Look no further than Brexit for proof of how rightist mavericks swallowed up the Conservatives, winning the referendum with their foghorn media. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows how far the UK’s growth has fallen, as Brexit gouges £100bn from our GDP.

In our “What’s-wrong-with-this-country?” soul-searching, we ignore our distorting media ownership as if it were just British weather. Living forever in its shadow, we have shrugged at this democracy-warp, even after it inflicted Brexit’s lethal harm.

The one defence was that the BBC and licensed broadcasters must obey impartiality laws. Why has Ofcom abdicated its democratic duty? Let’s see the government appoint a new chair with the grit to enforce the spirit of broadcasting law. Hodge, says Rusbridger, “fearless and tough, is exactly the one to take on this sleeping regulator and shake it up”. His forensic demolition, sent to Lisa Nandy and the culture, media and sport committee, should impel us all to watch GB News and overwhelm Ofcom with daily complaints.