Tag Archives: politics

Where does the Ofcom-GB News row go from here?

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The five ‘guilty’ verdicts by Ofcom against GB News followed by the broadcaster’s angry response suggest there could be an escalating battle between the two sides over the issue of whether politicians, especially MPs, can present political programmes. I doubt it but there could be a bigger, wider and even more important battle ahead.

The creation of GB News has crystallised two separate but sometimes connected issues:

  1. What programmes are serving politicians, especially current MPs, allowed to present on TV ?
  2. When presenters, be they politicians or anybody else, express strong opinions on topical matters how is due impartiality achieved?

Issue 1:What programmes are serving politicians, especially current MPs, allowed to present on TV? 

Nothing in the current law, Ofcom Code or Guidance sets out what a serving politician can present, only what they can’t:

‘Rule 5.3: No politician may be used as a newsreader, interviewer or reporter in any news programmes unless, exceptionally, it is editorially justified. In that case, the political allegiance of that person must be made clear to the audience’.

So what is a news programme that a politician can’t present?

The Code itself doesn’t define a news programme but the guidance has this significant section:

‘1.8 In terms of this section of the Code (i.e. the requirement for ‘due impartiality’ and ‘due accuracy’), news in whatever form would include news bulletins, news flashes and daily news magazine programmes’.

One thing is clear : the authors of the guidance intended that the definition of a news programme should cover more than just a news bulletin. ‘News in whatever form’ seems pretty clear. But soon after GB News started inviting politicians from the right – but not the centre or the left – to present daily programmes about the political news of the day Kevin Bakhurst, then the senior Ofcom executive in charge of content regulation, published a blog justifying the practice.

He produced a definition of a news programme which restricted it to a news bulletin. By doing so he argued that the politicians on GB News were not presenting ‘news programmes’ but what he called ‘current affairs’. The term ‘current affairs’ does not appear anywhere in the impartiality sections of the Communications Act, the Ofcom Code on Impartiality or the Ofcom guidance. This was, in effect, Kevin’s Law, there was never a consultation or debate about it. Ofcom now relies upon what was in his blog (he has since left Ofcom) to support its judgements.

The recent Ofcom judgements against GB News show the confusion this has created. When Jacob Rees-Mogg delivers his Moggolgue on that day’s political news, much of which goes unchallenged in the programme, he is apparently a ‘current affairs’ presenter but the moment he mentions breaking news he has been transformed into a ‘news presenter’ which, of course, he’s not allowed to be. Hope you are still with me. The obvious solution is not too difficult, every time news breaks inside these programmes the presenter should hand over to the newsroom presenter. That’s if GB News wants a solution rather than escalate the issue for its own reasons.

But none of this solves the bigger problem as we approach the local and General Elections, should politicians be allowed to present programmes about that day’s political news whether or not you call them News or Current affairs.

The simple and best solution: politicians should not be allowed to present programmes which report and debate the controversial issues of the day especially political news unless there are exceptional circumstances. That’s what we thought the rules said so why not return to that.

Which takes us onto …

Issue 2; When presenters, be they politicians or anybody else, express strong opinions on topical matters how is due impartiality achieved?

This issue has been overlooked during the row about politician presenters but in fact it is equally important .

What the Code currently says:

‘5.9: Presenters and reporters (with the exception of news presenters and reporters in news programmes), presenters of “personal view” or “authored” programmes or items, and chairs of discussion programmes may express their own views on matters of political or industrial controversy or matters relating to current public policy. However, alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented either in the programme, or in a series of programmes taken as a whole. Additionally, presenters must not use the advantage of regular appearances to promote their views in a way that compromises the requirement for due impartiality. Presenter phone-ins must encourage and must not exclude alternative views’.

A number of points arise from this:

  1. The implication of the first part of the first sentence is that news presenters and reporters in news programmes may not express their own views on current controversies or current public policy.
  2. However  presenters of non-news programmes can do so subject to the condition that alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented in the programme or a series of programmes. This is explained in the guidance: 

‘1.48 Broadcasters are free to include ‘issue-led’ presenters in their programming, as long as they maintain due impartiality as appropriate. In clearly signalled ‘personal view’ programmes, many in the audience are comfortable with adjusting their expectations of due impartiality. However, in order to maintain due impartiality, alternative viewpoints should be adequately represented’.

How adequate does the representation of alternative viewpoints have to be? The Code and Guidance are not prescriptive about this. According to a Guardian article :

‘The broadcast code enforced by Ofcom is clear that opinionated hosts are fine but “alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented”. It has not specified what exactly that means, but GB News insiders believe 10-15% representation for differing views is probably adequate’.

Ofcom refuses to put a figure on ‘adequate’ but I believe the figure of 10-15% is an accurate statement of the view inside Ofcom and GB News. Is that a satisfactory figure for Ofcom when the 85-90% of political views expressed on GB News come from the same perspective in every primetime programme every night?

The implications for the General Election campaign are serious. Ofcom has still not grappled with this issue of whether leading supporters of the same side (only actual candidates are disqualified during election campaigns) can appear night after night giving an unchallenged monologue on that day’s news. On Ofcom’s current interpretation of its code it seems this can continue during an election campaign. Surely that has to change. Can we really have election campaign coverage presented by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage where they and like-minded folk are free to say what they like about other parties but Labour and Lib Dem supporters get only 10-15% of the programme airtime between them to respond?

COULD NIGEL FARAGE BE AN ‘IMPARTIAL’ BROADCASTER ON GB NEWS DURING THE GENERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN?

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Nigel Farage, not normally a man for self-doubt, has admitted it ‘could be tricky’ choosing between party politics and broadcasting during a General Election campaign. Interviewed for  Politico’s ‘Westminster Insider’ podcast ‘Inside GB News’ about his future as the Honorary President of the Reform UK Party he replied:

‘if I want to cover a General Election for GB News under a period of purdah, it could be tricky couldn’t it, could be very difficult and I think ..but I don’t know, I’m thinking very hard about it. But I think it is an either/or choice’

So if Farage stood down from Reform UK and focused on covering the General Election for GB News would he run into trouble with Ofcom rules on GB News which now calls itself ‘Britain’s Election Channel?

To look ahead at what might be possible I first monitored his current output for a fortnight . Farage regularly echoed Reform UK’s attacks on Rishi Sunak’s ‘Brexit failures’ asking viewers ‘why do we believe a word they say’. For the past two nights Farage has quoted from what he calls his ‘Rwanda Files’, apparently leaked documents from the Home Office.  He says that Sunak ‘wilfully deceived the nation’ over ‘Stop the Boats’ when he said in March last year that under the Illegal Immigration Bill  immigrants on boats would be removed from the UK ‘within weeks’. Farage says the Home Office knew that couldn’t happen. After his first attack there was no coverage on his programme of any response from the Prime Minister or the Home Office, the second night saw a one paragraph quote from the Home Office.

The most common ‘Farage’ format is best described as the  “I agree with Nigel’ nights: 

  1. Opening monologue;  a familiar narrative of illegal immigrants and the crimes some have committed, the shortcomings of the Government’s Rwanda Bill and Britain’s ‘exploding population’.
  2. An interview with a GB News correspondent who plays a relatively straight bat on an issue of the day. 
  3. Interviews with experts: these are not the ‘fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’ who David Cameron once said comprised Farage’s UKIP party. They are Daily Telegraph correspondents, former army officers and chaplains to Queen Elizabeth. What they have in common is that they agree with Nigel. Sometimes they tell him that and sometimes he tells them.
  4. Captions summarising the reaction of viewers so far, normally three people who agree with Nigel.   
  5. A second monologue, titled ‘WTF’, in which Farage attacks his usual suspects such as the EU, Prince Harry and ‘senile’ Joe Biden. 

The irony about this format is that the rare occasions when a guest completely disagrees with Farage produces the best television. Labour supporter Scarlett MccGwire refuted his claim that the anger of Muslim voters over Gaza could be the start of ‘sectarian politics’ in Britain and damage Labour. She replied that ‘you are much more dangerous’ for the Conservatives because ‘you are going to make sure they lose the election’.   

During my monitoring  there were fewer interviews with MPs than I expected. Over the period I counted six Conservative MPs being interviewed by Farage, all were Brexiteers, but there were no Labour or Liberal Democrat MPs.  

That kind of imbalance wouldn’t previously have been countenanced by broadcasters or allowed by regulators but the current Ofcom regime have emphasised the freedom which they are currently giving to broadcasters to provide impartiality in their own way.

In the podcast interview Farage emphasised the editorial freedom which he’s been given by GB News. So what could a Farage election campaign programme look like ? 

1. Ofcom say that during election campaigns ‘It is not acceptable for presenters to use their position to encourage and urge voters to support political parties or candidates’. Farage is smart enough to avoid the call to action which got Talk Sport presenter James Whale into trouble with Ofcom during the Mayor of London election in 2008:

‘if people did not vote for Boris Johnson then they had only themselves to blame if “Livingstone gets in for another term”.

2. Ofcom also say ‘Due weight must be given to the coverage of parties and independent candidates during the election period’. GB News could solve this by extending the news bulletin that precedes Farage’s show to include more campaign coverage clips.

3.Since Ofcom seem to have no problem with the ‘I agree with Nigel format’ expect more ‘experts’ who tell Nigel, as one did during my monitoring period, ‘you’re quite right’.

4. The biggest change to the Farage status quo would have to be the selection of guests from political parties: 6-0 to the Tories won’t wash in an election. And Reform will certainly expect a say.

So there’s a possible template, now Farage has to make his ‘either Reform or GB News’ decision: either campaign for Reform and lose friends in the Tory Party by costing them votes or stay on air on GB News building an even bigger profile and preparing for a future Tory leadership election. 

40 YEARS ON FROM THE MINERS STRIKE, MEMORIES OF MY STRANGE ENCOUNTER WITH THATCHER’S SECRETIVE ADVISER.

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The battle between Margaret Thatcher’s government and Arthur Scargill’s union is rightly regarded as a turning point in 20th century Britain. So it is no surprise that it has been revisited, reviewed and re-enacted in British TV documentaries and drama.

Having seen most of them and appeared in a few, ’Miners Strike 1984 – the Battle for Britain’ gets my vote as the best yet. This three part series for Channel Four, filmed and mostly directed by Tom Barrow for Swan Films, is being scheduled on Thursdays at 9pm and all the episodes are already available online .

The films focus on ‘three powerful stories’: the divisions in the Derbyshire village of Shirebrook where striking and working miners came to blows, the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ and the subsequent attempt to jail miners for ‘riot’ and the story of the businessman David Hart who once told Margaret Thatcher ‘victory is yours and yours alone’ and set out to make it happen for her. As Thatcher’s adviser on the black arts of propaganda he helped organise and fund the working miners committee which successfully campaigned to get striking miners back to work. 

While I was Editor of Channel Four News (C4N) the Miners Strike from 1984-5 was the story that first proved the value of a primetime hour of TV news every weeknight. We sent reporter Jane Corbin to live in Shirebrook and her work is revisited in the first part of the new series. We also sent camera crews to stand alongside the pickets at Orgeave, other news programmes chose to stand behind the police lines.  As for David Hart, the focus of the third part of the series, I met him once in strange circumstances..

In August 1984, five months into the strike, Channel Four News planned a live TV debate between the leaders of the National Coal Board (NCB) and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Such encounters were extremely rare but at C4N we had built a reputation for serious coverage of the issues and both sides had a degree of trust in us,  Arthur Scargill was quick to agree to represent the NUM and the NCB put forward their Director of Industrial Relations, Ned Smith, a former miner.  Scargill would be live from Leeds and Smith would be on a live link from NCB HQ in London. The C4N presenter, Peter Sissons, a former ITN Industrial Editor, was an obvious and perfect choice to chair the debate .

There was a lot of media interest in who would come out on top in the debate and the Government helped to brief Ned Smith.  As I went into work on 22nd August 1984 all seemed organised for the big event and I was certainly not prepared for a mid-afternoon call from the NCB Press Office: ‘Stewart, I think you’d better come round to the Coal Board. I can’t say any more at the moment’.

As I arrived at the NCB I caught sight of Ned Smith leaving the building, and from his body language it looked as if he was in a huff. I was told he was getting a train home. Not exactly what I was expecting a few hours before the biggest TV event of the strike so far. My assumption was that the live debate was off for some reason but surely the Coal Board wouldn’t just pull out at the last minute handing a PR victory to Scargill.  Wondering around the NCB offices half-hoping that someone might just turn up to appear live, I discovered that the Coal Board would be represented by none other than the Chairman himself, Sir Ian MacGregor. “I will do it myself” he told me.

A Scot by birth, a U.S citizen by adoption, an industrialist toughened by confrontations with American unions he had been recruited to sort out British Steel  and then assigned by Margaret Thatcher to confront coal. 

Half of me was delighted, C4N would pull off a real scoop,  MacGregor and Scargill exclusively together live. The other half of me was worried, a few weeks before I had made a film with MacGregor to present his view on the dispute. At the same time a young producer called Michael Crick produced a film with Scargill. It was no contest, Scargill was a much better performer than MacGregor who seemed to have trouble reading a script. I wondered if he was dyslexic.

As we approached transmission at 7pm I discovered that earlier that day there’d been a mighty row between MacGregor and Smith with multiple changes of mind about who would appear for the Coal Board. Now the hard reality was that we were about to go on the air with an inexperienced and unprepared TV debater on one side. No wonder Scargill seemed pleased when told of the change of opponent. But as MacGregor and I walked into the makeshift studio at the NCB, I realised the Chairman was not going to be without a bit of help.

For there stood a man I had never met before, who was never introduced, a mustachioed, balding figure clutching a set of cue cards. I later discovered he was David Hart, an adviser to both MacGregor and Thatcher. In the short time he had to prepare the Chairman Hart had hand-written phrases on his cue cards for MacGregor to read out  Hart himself said nothing, he just stood off camera shuffling his home made cue cards.

Once Sissons began the questioning MacGregor, sweaty top lip glistening under the TV lights , would sometimes look to the side of the camera to read what Hart wanted him to say but at other times was confident enough to fly solo. It was never in doubt that Scargill would navigate himself and be more fluent and so it turned out. Both men began each answer strongly but then got lost in the details, it was MacGregor who got most lost. The exchanges made it clear just how much they disliked each other.

To wrap up the debate Peter Sissons observed that the general public would conclude that these two men had no common ground whatsoever and would ask ‘what are we to make of it?’. Neither respondent had a convincing answer. 

The encounter made news for the fact that it had happened at all rather than what anybody said. It proved there was no way to bridge the gap other than for one side to eventually knock out the other. Seven months later as more and more of the striking miners became working miners the NUM gave up and went back to work. David Hart’s work was done, Margaret Thatcher had her victory.

Extracts from the debate are available to view on the Getty Images news archive website gettyimages.co.uk. To see the first extract type in 1447914031 and for the second extract type in 1447914076

SECOND THOUGHTS 2

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How to conclude the BBC’s Lineker ‘psychodrama’

The more that MPs pressed Samir Shah for his views on Gary Lineker’s social media posts the more it sounded like the Chair-Elect of the BBC didn’t just think the football presenter had broken the rules Samir Shah wanted the system changed less than three months after it was announced.

“We need to find a solution to this”  he told his fourth questioner on Lineker, Clive Efford MP, at the pre-appointment hearing of the Culture Committee. “It has being going on for too long and it may be that the social media guidelines once again need to be looked at to make sure we somehow get this out of the public eye’. Dr Shah wanted to bring an end to what he called a ‘psychodrama’. 

’Don’t criticise the character of individual politicians in the UK’ seems a clear enough piece of BBC guidance to me and I’m not sure changing it would ‘get this out of the public eye’. The real choice is between enforcement and abolition.  The enforcement guidelines say  ‘For contract freelancers/presenters who are found to have breached the guidance there may be consequences including non-renewal or termination of contract’. But the BBC seems determined to avoid what they would see as a ‘running commentary’ on who has and hasn’t broken the rules and what consequences have followed. We still don’t have the BBC Executive’s judgement on the Lineker posts that their next Chair is so clear about. 

I have long thought the direction of travel is towards freedom of expression within the law for presenters other than those in news and current affairs.That solution may be the only way to conclude the psychodrama.

Are the next BBC Chair and the King on opposite sides in a culture war ?

“I’ve never been involved in any political activity at all. I’ve not been a campaigner” Samir Shah told Damian Green MP who took him through a checklist of any potential conflicts of interest.  Samir may not be a ‘campaigner’ but it is fair to call him a ’culture warrior’. He actively supports an organisation which says it is on ‘the most active front in a new culture war’.  The History Matters project was launched by leading centre-right think tank Policy Exchange in 2021 to ‘document the re-writing of history as it happens’ including the removal of certain statues on public display and the renaming of buildings and places. It claims such ‘action is being taken widely and quickly in a way that does not reflect public opinion or growing concern over our treatment of the past’. Samir Shah has been the Vice-Chair and is still a panel member of the project and he has  criticised institutions which are “far too readily acquiescing to noisy activism”. History Matters regularly lists examples of ‘what is happening’ without offering any judgement on them. The October 2023 ‘project compendium’ includes such undeniably woke events as an autumn festival at Kew Gardens ‘to celebrate Queer Nature’ but I was surprised to see Item 14 .’King Charles supports research into the Royal Family’s slavery links. The Palace have given researchers full access to the Royal Archives and the Royal Collection to investigate the family’s historic ties to slavery….The Palace has said that King Charles takes the issue ‘profoundly seriously’. Surely the Chair-Elect of the BBC doesn’t have a problem with that.

Growing demands for action on election misinformation

A leading expert on broadcasting regulation has warned that Ofcom may not have the right skillset to cope with the flow of fake news during the next General Election. Former Ofcom Director of Standards Chris Banatvala told a Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference that such was the innovation in technology that there could be fakery which is “so sophisticated that anyone can get fooled, including the regulator itself”. His warning follows a call by the Government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Dame Angela McLean ,for a public information campaign before the next election which would warn voters how they could be tricked by AI-powered misinformation.

Chris Banatvala was on a panel on fake news which I chaired which also included Marianna Spring, Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent at the BBC and Chris Morris, CEO of FullFact.The video is recommended for anybody interested in AI and fake news.