“To outsource editorial control wholesale like this is unprecedented, misleading for viewers, and probably doesn’t meet Ofcom’s impartiality rules.”
Sky News has faced a wave of complaints following “excessive” coverage of Reform UK. The backlash comes after the channel aired two live feeds directly from the party’s own TV studio, sparking accusations that Sky had “outsourced editorial control” to Nigel Farage’s party.
One of the live segments showed Reform’s leader Nigel Farage interviewing his party’s chairman, Zia Yusuf, about the Online Safety Act. During the same broadcast, Reform also aired Sky News’s own interview with tech secretary Peter Kyle, creating a strange scenario in which Sky was broadcasting its own content via Reform’s feed.
Campaign group Best for Britain, which monitors the post-Brexit political landscape, condemned the move as “unprecedented.”
“To outsource editorial control wholesale like this is unprecedented, misleading for viewers, and probably doesn’t meet Ofcom’s impartiality rules. It should never happen again, and over 5,000 Best for Britain supporters have written to say just that,” said Cal Roscow, the group’s director of campaigns.
He added: “Reform UK have built a TV studio of their own – which is fine in principle – but resulted in a bizarre situation where Sky News’s own footage of a minister was being broadcast back to the TV channel – independently of the producers – and overlaid with commentary from a political party’s chair interviewing that same party’s leader.”
Public reaction to the live feeds was swift and critical.
“He gets far too much air time for the leader of a party with only 5 MPs,” said one viewer.
Another mocked: “Has he found Clacton on the map yet?”
Of course, Sky isn’t the only news outlet accused of giving Nigel Farage disproportionate airtime. For years, questions have been raised about how much exposure the BBC has given the politician.
Earlier this year, researchers at Cardiff University conducted a comprehensive analysis of every episode of the BBC’s flagship programme Question Time, broadcast between September 2014 and July 2023, to assess whether the broadcaster was presenting a balanced range of political viewpoints.
The report coincided with Farage’s 38th appearance on Question Time, despite his party having just five MPs. The analysis, which covered 352 episodes and 1,734 guest slots filled by 661 individuals, found that while the BBC had “broadly balanced” representation from the UK’s main political parties, a right-wing bias became apparent when it came to media figures.
During the 2024 election campaign, concerns were also raised that media coverage disproportionately focused on Nigel Farage and Reform UK. According to researchers at Loughborough University, Reform received 10 percent of all press quotations, compared to just 2 percent for the Liberal Democrats, while the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru collectively accounted for less than 1 percent.
“This obsession with Farage has served only to normalise right-wing arguments on immigration and the economy and to further marginalise candidates with progressive ideas,” warned Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.
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