Press regulator Impress has kicked right-wing Unity News Network out of its regulatory scheme “with immediate effect”.
Impress said it initiated an investigation into the publisher after one of its tweets about the war in Ukraine went viral.
That investigation led to the discovery of a large number of tweets and articles about Covid and Ukraine which the regulator deemed problematic.
Impress said the content collectively amounted to a “systemic breach” of its standards code. Because of that, alongside the site’s failure to engage with Impress and its indication it would leave Impress anyway, Impress said it has unilaterally kicked Unity News Network out of the regulatory scheme.
It is the first time a press regulator has taken such serious action against a publisher over editorial issues in the post-Leveson era.
[Read more: IPSO v Impress – Ten years after Leveson, how are the press ‘watchmen’ faring?]
Impress’ review of Unity News Network began in April when former Southampton footballer Matt Le Tissier retweeted one of the publisher’s tweets about the Bucha massacre in Ukraine.
Unity News Network’s tweet had read: “The media lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The media lied about Covid. The media lied about the Hunter Biden laptop. But honestly they are telling the truth about Bucha!”
Satellite imagery and ground footage of Bucha, a town north of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, confirmed reports civilians there had been killed in the streets during Russia’s invasion.
The tweet was brought to Impress’ attention the following month by a third-party journalist, and prompted the regulator to begin a wider investigation of Unity News Network.
The investigation covered both articles and tweets by the publisher relating to Covid vaccines and the invasion of Ukraine. In particular, Impress highlighted eight tweets by Unity News Network that focused on the deaths of young people or athletes – under each, its followers had speculated the deaths were the result of Covid vaccinations.
Although the tweets had not directly mentioned vaccines, Impress said Unity News Network had fallen short of its standards code because “once it had been made aware of the comments burgeoning in a thread under its direct control (and that a self-selecting echo chamber had emerged), the publisher should have taken steps to address its cumulative impact”.
Not offering contextual information or corrections, Impress said, “enabled Twitter users to cast their own judgment without correction or clarification on the causes of death,” thereby misleading “through the omission of a crucial fact or facts”.
The regulator also rebuked Unity News Network for writing in articles that mRNA vaccines are “unlicensed” and “experimental”.
Impress said that “the hypothetical ordinary, reasonable reader would understand these statements to mean that the vaccine which was the subject of the article had not been approved by relevant medical regulatory authorities”.
Unity News Network was told of the investigation in late July and, according to Impress, said “it would not respond to the specific points raised in the investigation and issued notice of its resignation from the Impress Regulatory Scheme”.
The regulator said the “cumulative effect” of the large number of offending posts and articles over a “sustained period” constituted a rare “systemic breach” of the Impress standards code.
Impress has only initiated three systemic investigations before, and only one of those resulted in a sanction – against 5Pillars UK, for a “hateful” social media post.
However, because Unity News Network declined to assist the investigation and because it “made clear that it did not intend to comply in the future,” Impress went further, saying that “a proportionate remedy in this instance would be to end Unity News Network’s agreement with Impress without notice”.
Site owner David Clews responded to the sanction with an article in which he blasted Impress, writing: “When we joined we explicitly asked whether we would retain full editorial control and we were told Impress does not get involved in editorial content. We also asked whether Impress would scrutinise social media output. We were assured that we would be free to exercise our discretion.”
Unity News Network grew out of UK Unity, a grassroots pro-Brexit campaign group. The site is co-owned by UK Unity founder Clews and Unity News Network editor Carl D. Pearson, the former head of Youth UKIP Scotland.
Unity News Network had been regulated by Impress since 9 April 2019. It has been sanctioned once before by the regulator, following a complaint from anti-Brexit legal campaigner Gina Miller.
The site had previously used its status under Impress to defend its reporting, for example drawing on its affiliation with the regulator when asked by media watchdog Newsguard* about its coverage.
Ousting from a press regulator has been a rare sanction historically. Unity News Network appears to be the first to have suffered the punishment from either Impress or IPSO over editorial issues: an IPSO spokesperson told Press Gazette that in 2016 it did revoke two memberships, but those had been caused by the publishers’ failures to submit annual statements.
Similarly, the Daily Star and Daily Express were kicked out of Press Complaints Commission regulation in 2011 under Richard Desmond’s ownership, but that was because Desmond refused to continue paying the fees.
Ofcom has been stricter, in comparison, in the past decade or so axing broadcast licences for foreign state-owned outlets such as Russia’s RT (in March), China’s CGTN (in February 2021) and Iran’s Press TV (January 2012).
This article was updated after publication to include reference to IPSO’s expulsion of two publishers in 2016.
*The author of this article was previously a Newsguard employee, but was not involved with the review of Unity News Network.
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