TV channel GB News flouted broadcast rules last year after it aired a program in which US author Naomi Wolf likened the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine to a ‘mass murder’, she said on Tuesday the UK media regulator.
Ofcom She said that an interview between host Mark Steyn and Wolf constituted a “significant violation” of its rules — the second time the network has violated the guidelines. The watchdog said he called GB News “to discuss his approach to compliance”.
The channel has carved out a niche for itself in hiring right-wing politicians and commentators – including former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and former Tory cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg – as presenters. Other show hosts and guests have also previously expressed skepticism about pandemic lockdowns and the vaccine.
Veteran reporter Andrew Neil, who he resigned from chair of the network in September 2021, said at launch it would challenge the orthodoxy of UK news broadcasting, but also pledged it would not host “fake news, lies, misinformation, fact distortion and conspiracy theories” .
Ofcom found that in the interview, broadcast on 4 October 2022, Wolf “made serious claims about the Covid-19 vaccine”, including that its rollout amounted to a premeditated crime and was comparable to the actions of “doctors in the pre- Nazi”. Germany”.
The regulator said it had received 422 complaints saying its comments were “dangerous” and included “misinformation” that was “unchallenged”.
His investigation concluded that GB News “falls short” of the requirement that viewers be adequately protected from potentially harmful content by “allowing . . . Wolf to promote a serious conspiracy theory without challenge or context”.
Ofcom said the network presented Wolf “as an authority figure, with particular knowledge and experience in the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. . . would have lent credibility to his unchallenged claims.”
“Of particular concern was his significant and alarming claim that mass murder was taking place through the rolling out of Covid-19 vaccinations, which he repeated three times,” he added.
The wolf also appeared on The Mark Steyn Program on Oct. 5, making further claims about Covid strikes. But Ofcom said it would not pursue related complaints, as her comments “were contextualized by other views expressed throughout the programme, and a banner aired throughout the segment informing viewers that Naomi Wolf had” faced widespread criticism for her Covid research “.”
In response to Ofcom’s investigation, GB News said it accepted that “former presenter Mark Steyn and his host Naomi Wolf broke the Ofcom code in their broadcast on Covid vaccines last October”. Steyn last appeared on the channel five months ago, he said.
The network added that it took “Ofcom’s compliance seriously and we take freedom of speech seriously too”, saying the code “hasn’t been framed with channels like ours in mind, nor have they fully anticipated the current mix of broadcast news and opinion, or even the online and social media world.”
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