Michael Grade has used his first free-ranging comments since leaving Ofcom to defend GB News and accuse Britain’s biggest broadcasters of being embarrassed by a channel that he says speaks to the majority. Grade, who has retaken the Conservative whip in the House of Lords, said he could now speak freely because he was no longer at the regulator.
His remarks land now because the debate over GB News has shifted from newsroom rivalry to regulation. Grade told Politics Home that broadcasters were uneasy with a news organisation that covered what he called the agenda of the majority, adding that it gave airtime to people who have no voice on the. For readers asking why this is back in the spotlight, the answer is that Grade has gone from chairing the watchdog to openly defending the channel it has spent years scrutinising.
Grade argued that the real divide is not between lawful and unlawful broadcasting, but between editorial choices. He said immigration and Brexit do not get the same weight on the that GB News gives them, asking what the problem is if another outlet reflects issues he says matter to many voters. He also insisted that the same rules apply to GB News as to the, Sky and ITN, and dismissed the idea that compliance is especially difficult. “Everything’s a choice, all the way up,” he said, adding that GB News has “actually got better and better” and that due impartiality can sometimes be achieved with little more than a sentence in a script.
That claim sits uneasily beside a sharp challenge from Chris Banatvala, who said that after reading hundreds of pages of Ofcom impartiality decisions, the clearest explanation for the regulator’s failures may be Grade’s own view of how easy compliance can be. Banatvala said Grade was wrong to suggest the criticism of Ofcom was misplaced, and said the evidence was now clear that Ofcom is not applying the same regulatory standards to GB News as to other news services. He also said no one seriously argues that GB News’s editorial agenda is itself the problem, which cuts to the heart of the dispute: whether the channel is being judged too harshly, or too lightly.
The row is not happening in a vacuum. Ofcom has already faced criticism for not investigating GB News’s interview with Donald Trump at the end of last year, when complaints said claims about climate change, Islam and immigration went unchallenged. The regulator has since said it is investigating a complaint. A GB News spokesperson said the channel is Britain’s No 1 news channel and argued that its journalism serves the public rather than a media establishment elite.
Grade was appointed Ofcom chair in 2022 under Boris Johnson’s government, and his intervention now gives the pro-GB News argument something it has not had from inside the watchdog: a former chairman willing to say the channel is simply giving viewers what other broadcasters leave out. What remains unresolved is whether Ofcom will keep treating GB News as an ordinary news service under ordinary rules, or whether the pressure now building around its Trump coverage and wider complaints will force the regulator to explain, in public, why this channel is being policed the way it is.
