More than 60,000 people have reportedly complained over a GB News broadcast in which a presenter said that “full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons” at a church would “include paedos”.
Last week advocacy group the Good Law Project set up a portal to collect complaints, which it claims have now outstripped the previous most-complained about broadcast.
The nonprofit says it will present the complaints to Ofcom on Monday, the last day the complaints can be lodged with the regulator.
The most complained-about single broadcast in Ofcom history is a 2021 Good Morning Britain segment in which Piers Morgan said he “didn’t believe” comments made by Meghan Markle about the state of her mental health. The comments prompted 54,595 complaints, which were ultimately not found to be in breach of the Broadcasting Code.
However, an Ofcom spokesperson told Press Gazette that its audience complaints figures “reflect individual complaints made directly to us via our official complaints process”.
Ofcom said that as of Wednesday morning it had received 1,227 complaints about the broadcast directly and that “we’re carefully assessing these and the content before we decide whether to investigate”.
The regulator added that it was aware of the Good Law Project’s portal, saying: “The number of signatories to this petition will be noted in our Broadcast Bulletin, once we have made our decision.
“We consider each and every complaint made to us carefully, but the number of complaints about a programme does not determine whether we will investigate.”
What did GB News host Josh Howie say?
The “paedos” remark was made on 22 January by GB News host Josh Howie during the Headliners programme in the channel’s 11pm weekday slot.
Howie was responding to a sermon given on the day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, during which the Episcopal Bishop of Washington asked the new president to have mercy for immigrants and LGBTQ+ people.
Howie said: “By the way, the type of church she belongs to, the diocese — it talks about the ‘full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons’ [on its website]. I just want to say that that includes paedos! If you’re doing the full inclusion there.”
The Good Law Project said the comments constituted a slur and violated the Broadcasting Code, “which states that broadcasters must protect the public from harmful and offensive material”.
Good Law Project executive director Jo Maugham said: “Josh Howie’s comments were shocking, spreading dangerous disinformation about LGBTQ+ people.”
He added that the non-profit “will be helping the LGBTQ+ community – and those who want that community to enjoy the same dignity as the rest of us – to tell the advertisers who fund this hate how they feel”. GB News has been subject to a partial advertising boycott since its 2021 launch.
A GB News spokesman said on Wednesday afternoon, after publication: “We are aware of this deliberate and orchestrated campaign by the self-titled Good Law Project. Their actions misrepresent the programme and we encourage people to watch it in its entirety. GB News chooses to be regulated by Ofcom and takes its regulatory and compliance obligations very seriously.”
Howie has since argued on GB News that the comment “was a joke about churches as much as anything else” and that he “did not say trans people are paedophiles, I didn’t say intersex people are paedophiles… what I said, what I am saying, is that for some people, the full inclusion of the LGBTQ+ includes paedophiles”.
He also claimed some paedophile advocacy organisations have argued they fit within the Q — typically used to mean “queer” — in the LGBTQ+ acronym, although no mainstream queer organisations recognise this definition.
In October 2020 Laurence Fox, then a GB News presenter, posted on Twitter that drag artist Crystal and former Stonewall trustee Simon Blake were paedophiles, which the High Court ruled last year was libellous.
Mrs Justice Collins Rice said in her ruling that the “persistent homophobic trope of equivalence, or at least connection, between being a gay man and being a likely paedophile” was “one of the oldest, most pernicious and most stubbornly ineradicable falsities or myths of homophobia”.
Another incident involving Fox, in which he made “unambiguously misogynistic” comments about a woman journalist, is currently the eighth most complained-about broadcast in Ofcom history and the GB News broadcast with the most complaints.
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