China's state-owned broadcaster has had its licence to broadcast in the UK revoked by media watchdog Ofcom.
4 February 2021
China's state-owned broadcaster has had its licence to broadcast in the UK revoked by media watchdog Ofcom.
Ofcom said the company that owns the UK licence for China Global Television Network (CGTN) doesn't have day-to-day control over the channel, which is against its rules.
Star China Media Limited (SCML), which owns the licence, "did not have editorial responsibility" over the English-language satellite news channel, Ofcom said.
"As such, SCML does not meet the legal requirement of having control over the licensed service, and so is not a lawful broadcast licensee."
In the UK, broadcasting laws say licensees must have control over their service and its editorial policies.
Ofcom said an entity called China Global Television Network Corporation is "the ultimate decision maker" over programmes.
But the regulator said it was unable to transfer the licence to that company because it is "ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which is not permitted under UK broadcasting law".
'Efforts have been exhausted'
Such a transfer was also not possible because "crucial information was missing from the application", while CGTN had "repeatedly failed to respond to important questions" and had not carried out a restructure, according to Ofcom.
The regulator said it had given the satellite news channel "significant time to come into compliance with the statutory rules". It added: "Those efforts have now been exhausted."
The action to revoke the licence comes seven months after Ofcom found CGTN in breach of broadcasting regulations for airing a UK citizen's allegedly forced confession.
In July, Ofcom ruled that CGTN had been "unjust" to show footage of investigator Peter Humphrey "appearing to confess to a criminal offence". The channel was named CCTV News at the time of the broadcasts in 2013 and 2014.
And last May, CGTN was found to have breached the UK's broadcasting code by failing to preserve due impartiality in its coverage of the Hong Kong protests.
Barely half an hour after the Ofcom announcement, China's foreign ministry repeated its demand for a public apology from the BBC over its coverage of the pandemic in China. Some well-informed souls say that the timing may well have been genuinely coincidental - rather than a retaliatory gesture.
China has separately complained about the BBC's coverage of the mass detention of Uighur Muslims - which has prompted an international outcry - and the BBC's coverage of Covid-19. I'm told the BBC is standing by its reporting.
The context to all this is that in recent years, state broadcasters have become central to the international media ecosystem, seen as tools of soft power and propaganda.
And there is a broader tech Cold War between China and the West, and particularly the US, over how open the internet should be.
Once upon a time global conflicts were mostly about land and natural resources. Today, they're increasingly about information.
Shortly after the Ofcom decision was announced, China said it had lodged "stern representations" to the BBC over what it called "fake news" in its coverage of Covid-19 and urged the broadcaster to apologise.
The corporation should "stop harbouring ideological bias, stop smearing China, uphold professional ethics, and do objective, fair reporting on China", China's foreign ministry said.
The BBC said it stood by its "accurate and fair reporting of events in China and totally rejects these unfounded accusations of fake news or ideological bias".
