The Liberal Democrats have called for Ofcom to investigate GB News over alleged impartiality breaches after the channel featured Nigel Farage and Conservative MPs criticising Ed Davey and other opposition politicians about their role in the Post Office IT scandal.
The party has written to the head of the broadcast regulator, Melanie Dawes, to argue GB News’s coverage failed to highlight the role of Conservative politicians in the long-running saga.
The letter from Daisy Cooper, the party’s deputy leader, raised particular concern about a segment on the channel on Tuesday evening in which Farage made a series of allegations connected to Davey, who was the business minister with responsibility for the Post Office from 2010 to 2012.
“I was appalled to watch Nigel Farage, the chairman of Reform, launch a fictitious monologue about leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, with a number of factual inaccuracies,” Cooper wrote. “The Liberal Democrats were offered no right of reply. This therefore breaches both the accuracy and impartiality elements of the Ofcom code.”
Davey has faced some criticism for initially refusing to meet Alan Bates, the post office operator who led the campaign against the injustice, when he was in office, although he was subsequently the first minister to then meet Bates.
Cooper also highlighted segments involving Conservative MPs such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, saying she was shocked to see him “take aim at political leaders from other parties about the scandal, whilst not mentioning his own party’s role in this devastating miscarriage of justice”.
She wrote: “There was no mention that the Conservative party handed Paula Vennells [the former Post Office chief executive] a CBE and then made her a non-executive board member in the government.
“Nor did he mention that the governments of which he was a part dragged their feet over financial redress for the victims. Conservative MPs hired by GB News have been entirely silent on these matters, resulting in a wholly one-sided and partisan portrayal of a major political controversy.”
Cooper also said she had no confidence that Lee Anderson, the Tory deputy chair, would be impartial in hosting a GB News show on Friday, given he used prime minister’s questions to target Davey on Wednesday.
“Farage, Rees-Mogg and Anderson cannot be trusted to report on this issue fairly and accurately, as your code requires,” she wrote. “We urgently need an investigation into whether GB News is breaching your impartiality and accuracy rules.”
GB News has faced a series of Ofcom investigations into alleged breaches of the code, most connected to its widespread use of Conservative MPs as pundits.
Last year the regulator ruled that the channel had breached rules on potentially harmful content when a presenter used health data to make misleading conclusions about Covid vaccines.
GB News was contacted for comment.
