Imagine how shocked I was to have my free speech endangered by the boss of GB News before the channel even launched. Angelos Frangopoulos was offended by an article I wrote just after the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021, which Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News had arguably fomented with its endlessly repeated lies about the stolen election. I questioned the desirability of the UK being saddled with not one but two new opinion-led “news” channels (GB News and a Murdoch venture, which would eventually debut as TalkTV). Alas, my thoughts did not please Angelos, who was outraged at my “false imagining” that his channel would not be impartial. According to him, I had “misunderstood Ofcom’s due impartiality rules, which do not allow a biased news station in this country”. Mm. Maybe I have also misunderstood the shoplifting laws, which do not allow shoplifting in this country. And yet, shoplifters and biased news stations exist.
Spool forward in disbelief to this week, where the media “regulator” Ofcom has found GB News in breach of impartiality rules yet again. Biologists will know that, along with sloths and anteaters, Ofcom belongs to the order edentata – toothless mammals – so its comment was: “We expect GB News to take careful account of this decision in its compliance of future programming”. Quite why it expects that is a mystery, given this is the fifth time GB News has been found in breach of rules that Frangopoulos once claimed were existential for any UK news channel. Maybe the problem with GB News is that it talks to itself and is so hyper-elite that it essentially exists consequence-free.
