Calvin Robinson suspended as GB News presenter

Calvin Robinson said GB News was a mission, not a job

Calvin Robinson has become the third GB News presenter to be suspended in a matter of days after he shared his support for Dan Wootton online.

The TV channel said Robinson was being kept off air, hours after he stated it was "scared" of the "woke mob" and that if Wootton fell, "we all fall".

Laurence Fox's tirade against reporter Ava Evans in which he asked what "self-respecting man" would "shag" her led to both he and Wootton being suspended.

Wootton and Fox have since apologised.

On Friday, Robinson said he had been suspended shortly after posting on social media that he would only appear on Wootton's show if Wootton was presenting it.

He said his bosses were "scared" of Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, the "woke mob" and "careerist... vultures" within GB News.

Standing up for Wootton was, he added, "standing up for the very idea of GB News".

GB News confirmed Robinson had been suspended, "pending an investigation".

Hours later, Fox said that he had "completed my show trial... I mean disciplinary hearing" - a reference to the investigation launched by the channel into his comments.

It marks another turn in an escalating row over Fox's widely-criticised comments about political correspondent Evans in a live segment on Dan Wootton Tonight on Tuesday.

Fox and Wootton were discussing Evans' dismissal on Monday of the need for a "minister for men" in government to deal with a mental health crisis.

Fox, an actor-turned politician, said: "Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman... who would want to shag that?"

Both Wootton and Fox then laughed, before Fox added: "Sorry, it's true though."

Wootton apologised soon after. Fox initially said he stood by his words and cited the right to "free speech", however, he released an apology statement on Thursday on social media, in which he stated that he fully expected to be sacked.

'Way past acceptable'

GB News chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos, told Radio 4's Today programme that Fox's comments were "way past the limits of acceptance" and should have been properly challenged by Wootton.

He said its investigation into the broadcast was "looking very closely at the production process that went into the programme".

Frangopoulos said neither Fox nor Wootton had been sacked but that he expected the channel's investigations "to be resolved very quickly".

Ofcom said on Thursday that it had received 7,300 complaints about the segment.

The broadcast regulator's chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes told the BBC Radio 4 PM programme there were "good reasons to think there may have been a breach" of its rules on offence.

She said: "Clearly there's been a lot of concern about this and that's why we've actually acted very quickly this week."

Dame Melanie added more widely there was a "real issue with misogyny" in discourse, particularly on social media.

Ofcom launched the investigation under rule 2.3 of the Broadcasting Code, in which broadcasters must ensure material which may cause offence is justified by the context.

The watchdog told the BBC it had 12 investigations still open concerning GB News.

The channel had already been found to have breached Ofcom rules three times since launching in June 2021.

Ofcom ruled last week that GB News breached impartiality rules by allowing Esther McVey and Philip Davies, two sitting Conservative MPs, to interview Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

In May, it ruled that GB News failed to protect its audience from harm in October 2022 by broadcasting an interview in which US author Naomi Wolf told presenter Mark Steyn that the Covid vaccine rollout was a pre-meditated crime of "mass murder" - and comparable to the actions of "doctors in pre-Nazi Germany".

Steyn was also involved in the third breach, when in April 2022 his programme claimed, incorrectly, that official UK data showed definitively there was a causal link between a third Covid-19 vaccine and higher infection, hospitalisation and death rates.