LGBTQ+ coalition intervenes in Ofcom’s GB News investigation

CW: homophobia

Good Law Project has teamed up with a coalition of LGBTQ+ groups in a formal submission to Ofcom’s investigation into GB News.

The media regulator launched a probe into the rightwing channel in March, after a GB News presenter repeated a dangerous lie linking LGBTQ+ people with paedophilia – a slur which the High Court has called “one of the oldest, most pernicious and most stubbornly ineradicable falsities or myths of homophobia”.

While talking about the bishop who gave a sermon asking Donald Trump to “have mercy” on marginalised communities, one of the presenters on GB News’s topical show Headliners suggested that when her diocese “talks about the ‘full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons’ that “includes paedos, if you’re doing the full inclusion there”.

More than 70,000 people used our online tool to complain about a TV channel broadcasting this hatred, making it the biggest complaint Ofcom has ever received. But GB News is still lining up behind the show.

So we’ve teamed up with LGBT Consortium, TransActual, Trans Media Watch and others to argue that the regulator should sanction GB News for breaches of the broadcasting code, including failing to protect its audience from harmful material and the proscription of hate speech.

For Jo Maugham, executive director of Good Law Project, this “appalling” broadcast cuts to the heart of British values.

“Britain is a kind country, with kind people, who try to do the right thing,” Maugham said. “We don’t want and we can’t have foreign-funded broadcasters poisoning the national conversation with these ugly lies. Ofcom needs to say ‘Stop’.”

While the chair of Trans Media watch, Jane Fae, argued it should be “an open and shut case”.

“Our fear, though,” Fae said, “is that as so many times before, Ofcom will find sufficient wiggle room to allow it to let GB News off with mild censure, and no real consequence.”

It’s time for Ofcom to step up and make sure the media can’t make a business model out of monetising hate.