Julia Hartley-Brewer’s row with Palestinian politician saw most Ofcom complaints

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 the Hamas-Israel war 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”.

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 8,867 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 1,000 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 1,777 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 1,832 complaints, mostly about the behaviour of contestants Joey Essex and Sean Stone.

Emmerdale took fifth, with episodes of the ITV soap on May 27 and 28 sparking 1,193 complaints over scenes which saw vet Tom King, the abusive husband of Belle King, use a syringe to poison her dog Piper as part of an ongoing coercive control storyline.

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 9,065 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.

– The 10 most complained-about programmes of 2024:

1. Julia Hartley-Brewer’s exchange with Palestinian politician Dr Mustafa Barghouti on her TalkTV show (17,366 complaints).

2. An interview with Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on ITV’s Good Morning Britain (16,851 complaints).

3. Behaviour of Love Island contestants Joey Essex and Sean Stone (1,832 complaints).

4. Debate about whether XL bullies should be put down on ITV’s Good Morning Britain (1,777 complaints).

5. An Emmerdale storyline featuring a dog being poisoned (1,193 complaints).

6. A comment made by Big Brother contestant Sarah which some viewers considered to be racially offensive (747 complaints).

7. ITV general election debate between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer (710 complaints).

8. Interview with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage on ITV’s Good Morning Britain (705 complaints).

9. Comments made by broadcaster Nick Ferrari on ITV’s This Morning which some viewers claimed trivialised nut allergies (647 complaints).

10. Complaints about imagery on a Big Brother contestant’s T-shirt which was claimed to feature a pro-Palestine symbol (553 complaints).