Monthly Archives: July 2025

Has the time come to consider changing the law on British broadcasting? Ofcom seems to think so.

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For 22 years the Communications Act has been the law of the land on all things broadcasting. This week the regulator created by that act, Ofcom, announced it was starting a process that may lead to changes in the law. If this comes as news to you it may because you’ve had better things to do during July 2025 but it could also be the absence of news coverage. What regulation and legislation does Ofcom think needs changing and does the review have any impact on Ofcom’s disputes with GB News? Here’s my take:

1.What was the Ofcom announcement ? 

On 21st July 2025 Ofcom issued a press release headlined ‘Public Service content should be findable on YouTube’. The introduction said ‘Urgent steps must be taken to ensure that public service media content is easy to find and discover on third-party platforms, under new Ofcom recommendations to secure the system’s survival’. YouTube was the ‘third-party platform’ highlighted as being particularly important.

2. What were these Ofcom recommendations?

Of the regulator’s six recommendations the first four were about the future of PSBs (public service broadcasters such as BBC, Channel Four, ITV and Channel Five) and PSMs (public service media which Ofcom defines as mostly but not uniquely PSBs). Recommendation five was about the importance of media literacy. Sixth on the list of recommendations was ‘Streamlined regulation to strip away any undated and unnecessary restrictions’.

3.What kind of restrictions does Ofcom want to ‘strip away’.

No examples were given but the overall language in the press release was bold: ‘We are launching a fundamental review of our regulation of broadcast TV and radio’ and ‘this may involve legislative change as well as changes to our regulation’. In the body of the report there was no mention of ‘launching’ any ‘fundamental review’ but a lower key commitment: ‘we will review the regulation across linear and online services to determine if greater consistency is needed to protect audiences from harm no matter what they are watching and listening’. 

4. So what, as they say in the regulatory jargon, is ‘in scope’ for this review?  

I put that question to the Ofcom Media Relations Team and got this quote from an Ofcom spokesperson; ‘On the scope of this – we will look at what regulation needs to change to reflect market conditions and continue to protect and support audiences wherever they are. We’ll have more to say by the end of the year.’.

5. Any other clues? 

It’s worth listening to an interview which Cristina Nicolotti Squires, Ofcom’s Group Director of Broadcast and Media, gave to Matt Deegan of the Media Club podcast. At 17′ 30″ into the podcast Deegan put a direct question, was the review “about trying to change some of those rules” such as those which have caused regulatory and legal disputes with GB News. He didn’t get a direct answer, he was told that the review was about “making sure our regulation is fit for now”. It was “kind of like looking at it all really”. But some issues did get a passing specific mention from Nicolotti Squires: TV advertising, product placement, the future of the TV licence, and one piece of thinking aloud: instead of the separate content codes for broadcasting and video-on-demand “should there just be one code?”

6. What happens next?

Look out for Ofcom having ‘more to say by the end of the year’. There will also be ‘a comprehensive call for evidence this autumn’ and Ofcom will ‘seek input from stakeholders’. One moment in the podcast underlines that this process is nowhere near ready for launch. When Matt Deegan asked how his listeners could send in their views, the Ofcom executive seemed surprised: “that’s a good point” , but on reflection she reassured him: “everything is on our website”.In fact nothing about that particular process is on the website. 

7. How does all this connect with Ofcom’s problems with GB News?

Clearly Ofcom is going to be cautious saying anything while it considers the responses to its consultation on a tweak to the rules . The submission by Chris Banatvala and myself opposing that tweak and arguing for the enforcement of the existing rules is on this website. But a longer term review of the Broadcast Code and the legal framework could offer the regulator the opportunity to ask parliament to either tighten the rules on impartiality, relax them or abolish them for channels such as GB News.

8.Why did this announcement get tacked on as the last recommendation in a press release about PSB and the last page in a 65 page report when it potentially affects so much more ?

  • It includes all the required political buzzphrases such as ‘strip away regulation’ and ‘encouraging growth and innovation’.
  • Ofcom wants to get on the record the words ‘We are committing to update our regulation of broadcast TV and radio’ but isn’t actually ready to start. 
  • Should Ofcom ever need an ‘off ramp’ from its GB News problems the review could provide one.

Finally, here’s what my former Ofcom colleague Chris Banatvala of Bear Consultancy Ltd thinks:

‘Ofcom has always prided itself on regulating only where necessary and certainly no more than the law requires. Nevertheless, there appear to be 3 possible options on the table. First, it may think that it needs to tighten up the rules to make sure all broadcasters follow them in the same way. Second, it may consider there’s room to be more liberal with the rules but within the current statutory framework. Or perhaps, third, it believes that the current legislation is just too out of date, and it believes now is the time for a root and branch review of the law and wants to make recommendations to the Government (for example, removing the universal requirement for due impartiality on all broadcasters). Given that the UK is no longer a member of the EU, it doesn’t have to comply with its Directives – and this could result in greater flexibility in areas like the number of advertising minutes per hour, also sponsorship and product placement. But a decision to no longer follow these European rules could have consequences elsewhere.

Looking at the review, itself, it’s difficult to interpret what direction Ofcom is going in’

MEMORIES OF SANDY GALL, A VERY SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.

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In 1972 I started at ITN as one of Sandy Gall’s scriptwriters on News at Ten. In 1992 I was his Editor and organised his farewell party. As I discovered over those twenty years and since he was a truly remarkable man. I have written this tribute to Sandy in a newsletter for former ITN staff.

I was in the ITN Newsroom on the afternoon of 24 February 1991 the day the ground war began to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces. So far not a frame of film or video had appeared from any source. The phone rang and the switchboard said “It’s Sandy Gall for you”. Moments later a familiar voice was telling me, ever so calmly, that he had just crossed the border into Kuwait with Saudi forces, he had pictures of tanks crossing the border and the first Iraqi prisoners. His report would be ready in a few minutes. I told him that none of the bright young men and women reporters embedded with Coalition troops had filed. Which meant that this wily old fox, operating solo with his crew, possibly the oldest man on the battlefield at 64, had a world exclusive. “Oh good’; he replied modestly. All very Sandy.

I had first worked with him in 1972. I was in awe of him and the more I learned about Henderson Alexander Gall the more remarkable he became. In contrast with the calm, relaxed, elder statesman dashing off occasionally from the News at Ten desk to obtain an exclusive or two I found that he had once been an impatient and frustrated reporter constantly contrasting ITN unfavourably with his previous employers Reuters. “Although I knew all about being a foreign correspondent”, he later wrote, “I knew nothing about television’ when he joined ITN in 1963 aged 36. Compared to Reuters ITN was a ‘babe in arms’. 

He was shocked by how rarely and how late ITN sent on foreign trips and could be angered by cables from the Foreign Desk: “Bloody Boy Scouts. It irritated me beyond measure that men who were much inferior in experience should be dictating to me.”. On another trip he got angry about a particular microphone he was forced to take. “The idea of carrying this great lump of metal into battle was obviously absurd”. The crew ‘lost it’. 

It was in Vietnam where Sandy began to love television and ITN in particular. When in 1965 the Americans began bombing raids against North Vietnam he ‘cornered’ the Editor Geoffrey Cox but was initially told “I’m not convinced”. A week later he became the first ITN correspondent to report the Vietnam war and ten years later he would be the last as the Americans withdrew. Along the way there were some brilliant eye-witness dispatches from the jungle front line but he also found time for some rounds at the Saigon Golf Club . Excellent food and wine was consumed as high level contacts were entertained at restaurants. Sandy himself told the story of how he once cabled ITN asking for £300 to pay his hotel bill. The amount came out at the ITN end as £3,000, Sandy said the Saigon Post Office accidentally added a nought. The then Editor, Nigel Ryan, cabled back: ‘Your request for more funds. You supposed to be reporting Vietnam, not buying it’.” But another legendary story annoyed him, yes it was true that Sandy was given the keys to the British Club when the UK Consul left Saigon but he didn’t help himself to the wine in the Consul’s cellar.

What I learned about Sandy over the years was that he was partly driven by political views forged in his news agency days. In 1958 he was the only Western correspondent in Budapest when Imre Nagy, the leader of the Hungarian anti-Soviet uprising two years earlier, was executed. “As a Reuter man you’re supposed to be impartial and one was impartial in one’s reporting but one’s own private feelings were that this was a dreadful system that could behave in this sort of way”. In 1982 he set off to Afghanistan with a documentary crew: “I had seen Soviet power at its worst you might say, I wondered what was going to happen there”.

The veteran foreign correspondent, back in the saddle literally, accompanied by mujahideen fighters, traversed the mountainsides of the Hindu Kush. There was a message to go with the stunning pictures, Sandy had met Ahmed Shah Massoud, a mujahideen leader fighting the Russians, who he saw as ‘the second Tito’ leading his partisans against the foreign oppressors. Sandy’s friendship with President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan delivered a series of exclusives to ITN about Massoud’s men. Sandy walked into my office in 1989 with news that he secured a deal to take a satellite dish from Pakistan into mujahideen areas of Afghanistan and transmit live back to London. It caused a TV sensation, a BBC foreign editor once told me they ‘really hurt’ at our success. In 2012, long after we had both left ITN, I interviewed Sandy for a BBC radio programme called ‘When Reporters Cross the Line’. I wondered if he, indeed we, had done exactly that with our positive coverage of Massoud and our non-coverage of how deeply Margaret Thatcher’s Government was involved. Sandy was unapologetic. “I don’t feel at all guilty about it, I didn’t think I’d overstepped my area of journalistic impartiality”.

Nobody can ever doubt Sandy Gall’s bravery in so many places such as ‘C19’, Idi Amin’s favourite execution cell during Sandy’s time in detention in Uganda. He also had a passion for humanitarian commitment creating a charity which fitted 20,000 Afghans with artificial limbs. His wife Eleanor, who he met while they were both working in Hungary, helped run the charity until her death in 2018. So did his daughter Carlotta, now a senior correspondent with the New York Times, who approved of the title of her paper’s obituary;‘Sandy Gall,War Correspondent Without Swagger, Dies at 97’.