When will someone do something about GB News?
Their repeated airing of a dangerous homophobic trope proves they aren't fit to hold a licence
Last week, a single segment on GB News garnered 1,332 complaints to Ofcom – the highest number since Love Island: All Stars aired in February – and the British press has thus far said nothing. No clickbait articles, no follow-ups, no enquiring journalists – just radio silence.
I keep turning it over in my head and I can’t make it make sense. When Emmerdale draws a hundred complaints over a non-event, it’s a headline by the next working day. Good Morning Britain, Britain’s Got Talent, and yes, Love Island… a hundred here, two hundred there, write-ups appearing regularly and reliably every single week. This got more than thirteen hundred, and suddenly those same publications are turning a blind eye.
Does this effectively mean a national broadcaster smearing gay men as child abusers – for a second time – is less newsworthy than a tiff on a dating show? Or is it that the moment we’re the target, the threshold for anyone actually caring quietly rises? I’d love an answer, because I’ve been asking for almost a fortnight and nobody seems to want to tell me.
I’m angry. I have been angry for nearly two weeks straight and I cannot pretend otherwise. Let me take you through precisely what happened, and then perhaps you could explain to me why not one journalist could be bothered to talk about it.
The aforementioned GB News segment occurred during a programme named The Saturday Five, in which five random, unqualified “political commentators” sit at a panel and rave mindlessly about the week’s prior events, concluding with a feature titled Triggered Tantrums. You get the idea.
One of those commentators on Saturday 20th June was Based and Bougie, a young British-Congolese woman who has publicly aligned herself with the Unite the Kingdom movement, Tommy Robinson and Reform UK. On national television, during a segment on the recent, atrocious case of Preston Davey, she claimed that gay men are statistically more likely to sexually abuse their adopted children, stating:
“We need to get back to the nitty-gritty of why people are doing this. There is no denying – and I can’t pull up the evidence now, but people can easily research this – that gay men and gay couples are more prone to not only just domestic abuse amongst each other, but child sexual assault with their adopted children.”
When a fellow panelist asked her where the evidence is for this claim, she continued:
“I said I don’t have the evidence with me now, but I’ve seen it, and hopefully when I go online after this, I will post it – but the statistics are out there. They’ve been proven time and time again that gay men are more prone to more sexual deviancy.”
Only, the truth is – no such statistics exist. There isn’t a single body of credible research showing that gay or lesbian people are more likely to abuse children, but there is a great deal showing the opposite.
The landmark study here is Jenny, Roesler and Poyer, published in Pediatrics back in 1994. Of 269 cases of child sexual abuse with an identifiable perpetrator, precisely two of those cases involved someone who could be identified as gay or lesbian. The overwhelming majority of abusers are heterosexual men, often known to the child, a consensus that has been reached in every relative study since.
Every serious professional body – the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association, for starters – has said the same thing for decades, which is that children raised by same-sex parents do just as well as anyone else. In fact, a recent meta-analysis found that across 1,509 children, those with gay fathers often displayed significantly better adjustment than those with heterosexual parents.
This isn’t a case of differing opinion. Inventing evidence that a group of people are more likely to abuse children isn’t a viewpoint that deserves a polite response. It’s a falsehood, and it was broadcast to the nation as fact.
I posted an initial video to TikTok and Instagram a couple of days after the show aired, calling out Based and Bougie directly. After seeing this clip for myself, I hastily checked her social media accounts to find that evidence she promised. To nobody’s surprise, she hadn’t posted it – until a few hours after I shared my video, when she finally decided to cough up the “statistics” she’d seen “time and time again”. She thoughtfully posted them to X with the caption, “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
Here are the facts: she shared four articles, two of which were the same article, but she hadn’t read them properly. Off to a flying start.
So, she actually shared three articles. Two of the papers she offered as proof were the work of Paul Cameron. If you don’t know the name, here’s who Paul Cameron is. He is, in the words of Southern Poverty Law Center:
“…an infamous anti-gay propagandist whose one-man statistical chop shop, the Family Research Institute, churns out hate literature masquerading as legitimate science. Cameron dresses up his “studies” with copious footnotes, graphs and charts, and then pays to publish them in certain journals. Cameron’s work has been rejected by both the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association, yet his ludicrous statistics are frequently referenced in sermons, news broadcasts, politicians’ speeches and even court decisions.”
He was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 for misrepresenting research, and was subsequently condemned by the American Sociological Association. His institute is a designated hate group. He advised the Russian government on their anti-gay legislation. And, for further context, at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the late eighties, he advocated for homosexual concentration camps.
In short, Cameron is the single most discredited figure possible to cite on this subject, and citing him is a tell in itself – as was the fourth source Based and Bougie shared.
This one was a genuine, respectable Vanderbilt study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2022. The only problem is, it doesn’t quite say what she thought it did. Captioning the link “homosexual couples and the link to child abuse and molestation”, this study actually found that lesbian, gay and bisexual adults report far higher rates of adverse childhood experiences than their straight peers. In other words, we are disproportionately the victims of childhood abuse, not the perpetrators of it.
I think it’s clear what happened here – hoping nobody would pick up on what she said on live television, Based and Bougie hastily found some convenient sources without actually reading them, because that’s the usual practice with her audience. You don’t actually have to have any evidence, because you know people are going to believe it regardless. If this isn’t an indictment of GB News’ quality control in its hiring processes, I don’t know what is.
What angers me more is that this wasn’t just a slip of the tongue. This was, hands down, a deliberate action. Once I posted a second video debunking the statistics Based and Bougie shared, she blocked me across all platforms and decided to double down, instead of holding her hands up and admitting fault.
Her first follow-up was a repost of a video she captured at a Pride event last year. She approached men who did not speak English as a first language, filming them without their consent and asking them confusing, gibberish questions about what “love” means. Spinning them into near-delirium with her nonsense, she then asked whether a 45-year-old man wanting a five-year-old boy counts as love.
Aghast, the men say “no, no, no”, so she keeps tripping them up further until she gets a vaguely clippable response from one of them. She also asks for their thoughts on “MAPs” – “minor attracted people” – being added to the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Despite there being zero admission of paedophilia in the aforementioned video, Based and Bougie shared it to her Instagram followers this week, captioning it: “TB to when I went to a pride festival and they admitted P3dophilia is okay … DISGUSTING 🤮”.
The “MAP” claim itself is a long-debunked hoax with a paper trail. It originated on websites such as 4chan around a decade ago, explicitly designed by the far-right to get the public to associate LGBTQ+ people with predators and goad us into defensive reactions. No legitimate LGBTQ+ people or organisations on this planet includes or advocates for paedophiles, which is a ludicrous thing to have to actually say. The EU’s own counter-disinformation body, EUvsDisinfo, lists equating sexual minorities with paedophilia as one of the standard techniques of pro-Kremlin propaganda.
So, as you can imagine, there hasn’t been an apology – not from Based and Bougie, nor from GB News. Instead, she has mocked the community’s acronym multiple times, asked why “everything is about sex with you guys” and announced that she “despises LGBTQism” as if it’s a casual personality trait.
Just to give you a fuller picture of the type of “political commentator” GB News is employing, she also posted that she’s a “strong believer that woman (sic) shouldn’t be in politics”, over a clip of a man quoting scripture, and who called for us to “bring back shame” whilst sharing a placard reading “black parents are failures”. Not only is she black, but she blocked me the moment I debunked her on camera. Bring back shame, but evidently not for her!
I’m laying all of this out flatly on purpose. I don’t need to call her any names, because her track record does the work for me.
But if I only wrote about one person, I’d be missing the actual point. The problem here is the machine at large. GB News platforms people like this and still expects to be treated as a legitimate news channel, as it is licensed (despite a common misconception that it avoids accountability due to being licensed as an entertainment channel, which isn’t true).
As I mentioned earlier, this isn’t the first time the channel has aired this exact trope. In 2025, a near-identical smear drew a breach finding from Ofcom and garnered tens of thousands of complaints. That time, the presenter in question gave a lacklustre apology and that was the end of it. There were no sanctions, no fines, and no consequences of any kind. The file was subsequently closed.
Think about what that actually teaches the broadcaster. A channel that pays no price learns one lesson only, and that’s that it can do the same thing again tomorrow with impunity. So it did, because of course it did. It aired the exact same lie in fresh wrapping, this time dressed up as “existing statistics”. I would argue that it runs headlong into the Broadcasting Code’s strict rules on accuracy and material likely to cause harm, and I think there’s a serious case for a full investigation and a sanction that actually lands. That, however, is for Ofcom to determine – and the last time they had the chance, an apology let GB News off the hook.
I know exactly what happens as a consequence, because it has landed squarely in my lap over the past week. In the days after posting my videos, I was called a paedophile or a nonce more times than I could count. Someone called me a child murderer. Someone else threatened to give me brain damage.
Can we just take a moment to sit with that? A national broadcaster put a fabricated smear on air, and within days total strangers felt the need to wish physical harm on me for the crime of objecting to it. That is the human cost, and it doesn’t show up in the complaints figures or ratings reports. It just gets quietly absorbed instead, because this type of behaviour has become commonplace on the internet and the blame often falls on the one speaking out – for daring to do so in the first place.
Which brings us back to where we started – the radio silence. I had a thought that the non-coverage was innocent. Perhaps it was a busy news week, or every journalist in the country was off this week, or that GB News is so relentlessly inflammatory that the outrage barely registers anymore. I’ve heard all of the excuses – the channel is controversial by design, it’s a harder sell than an article about Love Island, inboxes are too busy. I don’t accept a single one of them.
Those excuses essentially amount to the fact that a licensed news channel can fabricate a child-abuse claim about gay people, air it to the whole country, watch it pull the biggest complaint count in months and everyone can carry on as normal.
I’m sorry to say it, but this is not neutrality. How can it be when the lie gets a national platform and a primetime audience, and the truth gets me shouting into my phone and total silence from every single person whose actual job this is?
So, I’ll ask it plainly, and I’ll keep asking until I’m blue in the face. Why the fuck is nobody doing anything? Why does a dangerous, decades-old lie get regurgitated to the masses as fact whilst the truth isn’t worth anyone’s time? I am beyond tired of asking. I would just like someone else, one solitary person with the power to move the needle, to be tired enough of hearing it to finally act.
This is the exact lie that Section 28 was built on – that we are a danger to children, paedophiles by default who should be segregated from the young. That law lasted for 15 years and did immeasurable, lasting damage to a generation. Gay children in classrooms across the country were told they were something shameful and unspeakable, and couldn’t receive any support for bullying lest the teacher aiding the pupil be fired for “promoting homosexuality”. Countless gay men died to AIDS because of a lack of information. Teachers changed professions permanently, whether it was of their own accord or after being forced out (there is a petition right now for a public inquiry into the harm Section 28 did, and we’re gunning for 100,000 signatures – it’s open until September, so please consider signing).
And here we are in 2026, 23 years after that law was repealed, watching the same smear get built from scratch and broadcast on national television. If that doesn’t make you angry, I don’t know what will. It should frighten you how quickly this is coming back at the very second we got comfortable. Homophobia isn’t a thing of the past anymore. It is happening right now, running off the same rotten script it always has, and the only thing that has ever stopped it before is people flatly refusing to stay quiet.
I’d like you to decide what kind of person you’re going to be about this – and I do mean decide, because doing nothing is a decision too. It’s the exact decision every editor in every newsroom made this week, and you can see precisely what the intent is. Apathy isn’t neutral – it’s the fuel this whole thing runs on.
So, I’m inviting you to be a total nuisance with me. Complain to Ofcom – the broadcast is still on the record (The Saturday Five, Saturday 20th June, 6-8pm). It takes a couple of minutes, and every single name added makes it harder for anyone to pretend our anger isn’t real and growing.
Sign the Section 28 inquiry petition before the 24th September, and be sure to say hello to the Section 28 Justice Coalition at London Pride this weekend if you’re attending.
Share this piece, and tag any journalists or public figures who should be speaking about this. Silence is only effective if it’s unanimous – all it takes is one major publication to get the ball rolling. Break the unanimity and put it right in front of them. Make it awkward for people to keep looking the other way.
1,332 people shared their anger last week, but the entire establishment seems to be waiting us out. Don’t let them. Don’t hand them the eventual quiet they’re banking on – get loud and stay loud. Make this the moment their silence actually costs them something.