The communications regulator, Ofcom, defeated in the High Court by GB News over their decisions on ‘due impartiality’ and whether a politician can present a ‘news programme’, now want to tweak the Broadcasting Code. Chris Banatvala and I, formerly colleagues at Ofcom, strongly disagree with the proposal from our former employer. We’ve monitored GB News’s primetime output for a week and the content analysis shows the proposed solution only creates new and more problems for the regulator. Ofcom rely on differentiating ‘news’ (which they agree politicians can’t present) and ‘current affairs’ (which they argue politicians can). So they now say politicians can’t be ‘news interviewers’. But our monitoring reveals that every interview conducted and presented by Nigel Farage and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg in our week of monitoring was about that day’s news stories, clearly making the politicians ‘news interviewers’ by any definition.

The monitoring was just part of our review of all the legislation and regulation on due impartiality. Instead of a tweak that won’t work we want Ofcom to enforce the Communications Act in the way we believe Parliament intended. So for the first time we’ve made a submission to an Ofcom public consultation challenging them and asking : ‘was it ever Parliament’s intention that a leader of a political party, or potentially – a Prime Minister, could host an ‘impartial’ daily programme about the political news of that day’.

This is the submission.