Ofcom calls LBC meeting after Farage complaint

Ofcom has requested a meeting with LBC managers to discuss its compliance processes after it rejected a complaint about Nigel Farage.

The presenter, who is on-air Monday to Thursday 7pm till 8pm, attracted a complaint from a listener after giving out five statistics regarding Brexit during his show on 3rd October 2017.

Farage introduced the short feature as “up-to-date, Brexit business briefings” and “up-to-date economic news, but the information given was not offered with the relevant publication dates.

In one of the statements, he incorrectly stated that the UK had been ranked as the eighth most competitive economy in the world in 2017 and that this was its highest ranking for the last 10 years.

LBC considered that the info was not materially misleading, but did flag the complaint to the presenter and will in future highlight that it may be helpful for listeners, who are not familiar with economic statistics, to be made aware of the dates associated with publications in such instances.

In Ofcom’s view, Mr Farage misrepresented two sets of statistics but did not consider these misrepresentations to be so significant as to be materially misleading.

The regulator said: “Our Decision was that the programme was not in breach of Rule 2.2 of the [Broadcasting] Code. This case follows several other examples of Ofcom giving guidance to the Licensee about how this presenter has presented factual matters in programming. We are therefore requesting LBC to attend a meeting to discuss its compliance processes in this area.”

For full details of the complaint, see page 55 of the latest Ofcom complaints bulletin.