Ofcom investigates GB News over repeat airing of Donald Trump interview

GB News is facing a fresh Ofcom investigation after the UK regulator said it is reviewing a daytime repeat airing of an interview with Donald Trump. According to The Guardian, the interview was broadcast in full on a November edition of GB News’s The Weekend, the day after it first ran on the channel’s US-based Late Show Live.

The complaints focus less on the fact of an interview than on what surrounded it: viewers argued that Trump’s claims on climate change, Islam and immigration went unchallenged. The Guardian reports that Trump said human-induced climate change was a hoax, and repeated claims that parts of London were “no-go areas” for police and that some areas were under sharia law. Ofcom said it is investigating whether the programme breached rules on “due impartiality” and “material misleadingness”.

The oddity is procedural. Ofcom previously decided not to investigate the original broadcast, but is now opening a case into the repeat transmission. Ofcom has not explained why the second showing is treated differently, though it has noted in general that it assesses the wider “context” around an interview, including other discussion and framing. The Guardian notes that The Weekend aired during the day in the UK and would likely have reached a larger audience than the overnight original.

That difference in reach matters because broadcast regulation is built around scarcity and impact: the same words delivered to a small late-night audience are treated as a smaller problem than the same words delivered into daytime schedules. But the modern distribution system is not just the linear broadcast. A complainant cited by The Guardian, Richard Wilson of the Reliable Media campaign group, pointed to GB News social media clips from the interview, including the climate claim, drawing more than 100,000 engagements online—an afterlife that sits outside Ofcom’s traditional levers.

The timing also illustrates how enforcement works in practice. Wilson said the investigation began about six months after the programme aired and described the delay as regulatory failure, arguing the move followed sustained pressure from members of the public, MPs and civil society. The Guardian adds that Ofcom’s shift comes after the departure of its chair, Michael Grade, with successor Ian Cheshire not yet formally in post.

GB News, for its part, said it was surprised and concerned by the delayed decision to investigate, and questioned the consistency of Ofcom’s processes given the earlier decision not to pursue the original broadcast. The channel said it stood by its journalism and editorial standards.

Ofcom is now weighing a daytime repeat of a November interview, while the most widely shared version of the same material appears to be the clips circulating online.