Media regulator Impress has ordered Muslim news site 5Pillars to either remove or significantly alter an episode of its podcast which the regulator says encouraged “hatred and abuse” towards Jewish and LGBT people.
The February podcast, which is still accessible at time of writing, is a two-hour interview with Mark Collett, the leader of far-right political party Patriotic Alternative and a former British National Party spokesperson.
Impress said that the interview — in which Collett said “Jewish influence” was being “wielded in such a way that they have a negative impact on the white population”, and that gay and transgender people were “poison” and “degenerate” — breached the discrimination clause of the Impress Standards Code.
Impress finds 5Pillars interview had ‘cumulative effect’ of encouraging hatred
Collett attracted notoriety in the past as the focus of the 2002 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, “Young, Nazi and Proud”. His current party says it wants to offer British citizens “of immigrant descent… generous financial incentives in order to return to their ancestral homelands”.
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5Pillars’ podcast and accompanying video of the interview were published to alternative streaming platform Rumble, rather than Youtube, “due to the controversial nature of the guest”, according to 5Pillars. The audio of the episode is available on mainstream podcast providers Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
5Pillars told Impress the decision to interview Collett had been “a difficult one that it considered carefully” because the activist was “notorious in the Muslim community due to his anti-Islam rhetoric”. It proceeded, however, because Collett gave 5Pillars full editorial control and the publisher “decided that most of its viewers would be interested in what he had to say”.
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The website told Impress it “does not endorse Mr Collett in any way”, that it is “against racism and anti-Semitism” and that it edited out some of Collett’s comments from the podcast that were “blatantly anti-Semitic”.
The Impress regulatory committee said Collett’s remarks “had a cumulative effect of encouraging hatred and abuse towards Jewish people” and were met with only “insufficient challenge from the interviewer”, 5Pillars deputy editor Dilly Hussain.
Impress highlighted Collett comments such as “Zionist control of British politics is at an unprecedented level” and that “Jewish supremacists… walk amongst us and they look like us. It’s people like [Labour MP] Margaret Hodge in Barking and Dagenham, people think she’s just a normal white lady. Well, she’s not”.
Impress said the latter comment in particular had been “clearly dehumanising, constituting an explicit encouragement of hatred or abuse against Jewish people” and that it “was not challenged by the interviewer”.
At one point in the interview Collett likened Labour and Conservative Party leaders Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak to two hand puppets controlled by a single person, which prompted Hussain to interject asking: “By who — Jews?”
Although 5Pillars said this represented “his attempt at seeking clarification” on who Collett thought was controlling the political system, Impress said it had appeared “invitational” and that “a more appropriate question would have been to ask who this ‘man behind the scenes’ was”.
At various points in the interview Hussain noted that Collett’s views would be regarded by many as anti-Semitic, but the regulatory committee said this approach “did not go far enough”.
“While some of the excerpts in isolation may not have reached the threshold for a breach of Clause 4.3, together they had a cumulative effect of encouraging hatred and abuse towards Jewish people,” Impress said.
“Insufficient challenge from the interviewer had created an impression that a platform had effectively been provided for the antisemitic views of the interviewee, however strongly the publisher might disagree with some of the interviewee’s other inflammatory opinions.”
5Pillars podcast ‘perpetuated narrative of prejudice that could encourage hatred’ toward LGBT people
Impress also rebuked 5Pillars over two portions of the interview focusing on LGBT people.
In the first, Collett lauded what he described as a social benefit of Islam in the UK, saying that for young boys the only way to find a support network was “if you are gay, transgender, come to school in a dress, adopt all that weakness, madness and poison…the only other viable option to Islam is the degenerate madness”.
He also said later in the podcast: “If there is some flamboyant, homosexual drag queen that wants to advocate for sex with children, I don’t think they should have the right to sit in libraries and speak to children.”
Impress said that “likening homosexuality and transgenderism to ‘degenerate madness’ would have caused widespread offence and was dehumanising” but the statements were nonetheless not challenged by Hussain.
The second comment, the regulator said, implied that there are “documented cases of homosexual drag queens, who advocate for having sex with children, and attend libraries and talk to children”, for which it said there is no evidence.
“An appropriate response from the interviewer would have been to challenge the basis of this claim and ask Mr Collett why he was singling out this case without presenting any evidence that sexuality or gender identity was a disproportionate factor in the incidence of child sex abuse.
“The committee considered that this lack of challenge to the interviewee’s statement served to perpetuate a narrative of prejudice that could encourage hatred or abuse towards LGBT people.”
Ultimately Impress determined that Hussain “would have been well aware both of the issues to be discussed and of the likely responses of the interviewee, which might present a high risk of breaching the Code”.
This “placed a burden on the publisher interviewer to prepare robust and effective questions and challenges for use throughout the interview… and for the publisher to be prepared to sufficiently edit the content prior to publication”.
Failure to do so, Impress said, “risked leaving the audience with the impression that the interviewee’s statements were endorsed by the publisher”.
As well as the removal or alteration of the podcast, Impress said 5Pillars should display a notice of adjudication with a link to the full ruling next to the podcast permanently and on the 5Pillars homepage for 48 hours.
Tuesday’s ruling is not the first time Impress has rapped 5Pillars for anti-LGBT discrimination. Following a standards review in 2021 Impress sanctioned the site over a video that described homosexuality as a crime, making 5Pillars the first publisher to be rebuked as part of an overall standards review by either Impress or the UK’s other press regulator IPSO.
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