“This is the second significant breach of the Code recorded against GB News . In light of this, we are requesting that GB News attends a meeting with Ofcom"

GB news has once again been slammed by the media watchdog Ofcom for breaching broadcasting rules after it allowed false claims to be aired about the Covid-19 vaccine.

Ofcom said that an episode of the Mark Steyn show on October 4^th 2022 saw guest Dr Naomi Wolf make serious claims about the Covid-19 vaccine, ‘including that its rollout amounted to a pre-meditated crime – “mass murder” – and was comparable to the actions of “doctors in pre-Nazi Germany”.

Ofcom says it received 422 complaints that alleged these comments were “dangerous” and included “misinformation” that went “unopposed”. The media watchdog said that of particular concern was Dr Wolf’s significant and alarming claim that “mass murder” was ‘taking place through the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccinations, which she repeated three times’.

In a statement, Ofcom stated: “We found that the comments made by Naomi Wolf had the potential to impact viewers’ decisions about their health and were therefore potentially harmful. Given that GB News did not take adequate steps to protect viewers from this potentially harmful content, we have found the channel in breach of Rule 2.1 of the Broadcasting Code.

“This is the second significant breach of the Code recorded against GB News . In light of this, we are requesting that GB News attends a meeting with Ofcom to discuss its approach to compliance.”

In March, GB News was found to be in breach of Ofcom regulations, after presenter Mark Steyn made “potentially harmful and materially misleading” claims about Covid-19 vaccines.

The broadcasting rules were broken when Steyn made comments about the Covid-19 booster jabs, claiming falsely that data showed significantly greater risk” of “infection, hospitalisation and death”, from the third jab.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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