JULIA Hartley-Brewer’s heated exchange with a Palestinian politician on her TalkTV show was the most complained-about TV event of the year, media watchdog Ofcom has said.
Remarks made by the broadcaster during an interview with Mustafa Barghouti, the general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, on January 3 received 17,366 complaints.
Hartley-Brewer was discussing Israel's assault on Gaza with Dr Barghouti after a senior official in the militant group Hamas, Saleh Arouri, was killed.
In a clip of the interview shared by TalkTV, Hartley-Brewer can be seen getting more agitated with her guest and accusing him of not letting her “finish a sentence”.
Journalism is committing suicide after this interview pic.twitter.com/fYYF1TUoUx
— Dima Khatib (@Dima_Khatib) January 5, 2024
As he is talking, Hartley-Brewer begins to shout over him, eventually saying: “You talked about how you don’t want Israel, you’re saying Israel, October 7 happened, you’re placing that in a historical context, I understand that, please don’t say that again. We don’t have time for it. You’ve made that point five times already.”
Finally she gave him “10 seconds” to outline what an acceptable reaction to the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel would have been.
“End occupation and allow peace to prevail for both people,” Barghouti said.
Hartley-Brewer then sniped that the response was “brilliant”, adding: “Sorry to have been a woman speaking.”
Commenting on social media afterwards, Barghouti said: "The arrogance of a racist and unprofessional journalist."
Award-winning British-Lebanese journalist and author Hala Jaber added that Hartley-Brewer’s performance was a “disgrace”.
After assessing the complaints, Ofcom said it told TalkTV to “take extra care to ensure that potentially highly offensive comments are editorially justified”.
The volume of complaints received for Hartley-Brewer’s interview was almost double those to the most complained about programme of last year – Laurence Fox’s “misogynistic comments” about female journalist Ava Evans, in which he asked “who would want to shag that?”, received 8867 complaints.
The Hartley-Brewer incident beat an episode of ITV’s Good Morning Britain on August 5 to the top spot, which picked up 16,851 complaints.
The majority of those complaints were about an argumentative interview with Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana about the violent protests in some parts of the UK in the wake of the killing of three young girls in Southport.
Around 1000 complaints were also directed at presenter Ed Balls interviewing his wife, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, about the protests.
The media regulator said its assessment found Sultana was “given ample opportunity to express her views and respond to the questions put to her”, and it reminded ITV of the need to make relationships, such as the fact Balls and Cooper are married, clear to viewers and their responsibility to due impartiality.
An episode of the ITV breakfast show on May 30 also garnered 1777 complaints, putting it in fourth place for the year.
The complaints came after a debate between guests, broadcaster Mike Parry and dog trainer and XL Bully owner Kay Taiwo about whether the dogs should be put down.
Meanwhile, in third place was an episode of dating show Love Island which received 1832 complaints, mostly about the behaviour of contestants Joey Essex and Sean Stone.
The figures do not include complaints about the BBC, which are handled by the corporation in the first instance.
Over the year, Ofcom received 69,080 complaints about more than 9065 cases, a drop from 2023’s total of 69,236 complaints.
The watchdog also launched 43 broadcast standards investigations, finding in 40 of these cases that its rules had been broken.
