Margaret Hodge, Ofcom and the strangling of independent journalism

REPORTS that former Labour MP Baroness Margaret Hodge is the frontrunner to become the next chair of Ofcom might once have registered as little more than routine Westminster choreography. Today it carries far greater significance. Not because of personality, but because Ofcom itself has been massively transformed and has acquired huge potentially draconian powers.

The Online Safety Act has hugely altered the scale, reach and character of the regulator. Ofcom was once primarily a broadcast and telecoms watchdog. It licensed television and radio services, allocated spectrum, and adjudicated complaints about impartiality or taste and decency. It was important, but bounded. Its writ applied to identifiable broadcasters operating within a relatively stable legal and cultural framework.

That world has gone.

Since the enactment of the Online Safety Act in 2023, Ofcom has expanded hugely. Its overall workforce now stands at roughly 1,500. Within that, a dedicated Online Safety Group has been built from scratch, running to around 200 specialist staff in its early operational phase and expanding further as the regime beds in. Recruitment has extended into technologists, data scientists, enforcement lawyers and digital policy specialists. Government funding to support these new duties is at least £70million annually.

Ofcom is overseeing services numbering in the tens of thousands. This is bureaucratic bloating on a major scale.

Scale changes culture. A regulator that grows rapidly, acquires sweeping new powers and becomes central to national political debates does not remain the same organisation. It strains to use its powers. It must show that Parliament’s confidence was justified. It must avoid being accused of timidity in the face of perceived public anxiety about online harms.

This is the context in which the appointment of a new chair matters.

This is not about demonising Baroness Hodge, though she carries a lot of baggage about her judgment. The question is whether, at a moment when a government appears determined to tighten its control over what it regards as harmful or destabilising online narratives, Ofcom under new leadership will instinctively lean toward expansive intervention.

The Online Safety Act does not ban journalism directly. It operates through incentives. Platforms face immense financial penalties if Ofcom concludes that their systems have failed to mitigate risk adequately. When the downside risk is severe, the rational corporate response is caution. And in the governance of speech, caution translates into removal, throttling, demonetisation and de-amplification.

No minister needs to pick up the phone and demand that a story be taken down. The regulatory architecture itself nudges companies to err on the side of suppression.

Journalism, however, is inherently messy. It quotes extremists in order to expose them. It reproduces disturbing material to reveal wrongdoing. It reports on riots, terrorism, controversial protests and deeply divisive political arguments. Context is everything. But automated AI systems designed to detect ‘risk’ do not understand context in the human sense. They identify patterns. They respond to triggers. Under regulatory pressure, those systems are calibrated conservatively. Ofcom’s codes of practice will influence that calibration.

The Act contains protections for recognised news publishers. That is welcome. Yet journalism in 2026 is not confined to the MSM. It includes independent investigators, small online outlets, freelance reporters and citizen commentators who often break stories long before they reach national prominence. If regulatory interpretation implicitly favours established institutional players, a two-tier system emerges in which large entities navigate the regime more easily while smaller dissenting voices encounter disproportionate friction.

Even where publisher content is formally protected, distribution remains vulnerable. Modern journalism lives through circulation on social platforms: through sharing, excerpting, commentary and debate. If the surrounding ecosystem of user discussion is suppressed because it intersects with controversial themes, the journalism itself becomes harder to find. Freedom of expression is not simply the right to publish; it is the ability of speech to travel.

There is also the question of context-dependent offences. The category of ‘illegal content’ is not confined to the universally condemned. It includes a range of communications and public order offences that depend heavily on interpretation and context. In a courtroom, such matters are weighed with care, evidence and argument. On a platform facing regulatory scrutiny and potential sanction, the calculus is blunter. If speech sits in a grey zone, restriction is safer than risk.

The political climate intensifies these dynamics. The Labour government – with all the subtlety of a blunderbuss – has signalled a determination to clamp down on what it regards as harmful or destabilising narratives. It has spoken of extending regulatory oversight further, including into emerging AI systems. It frames certain forms of dissent as risks to social cohesion. In such an atmosphere, the interpretative stance of the regulator becomes decisive.

Ofcom’s growth amplifies this moment. A larger regulator, with hundreds of new staff dedicated to online safety, tens of millions in new funding and a mandate that touches the daily speech of millions, will inevitably develop an institutional identity around harm mitigation. Under public pressure following any online controversy, the accusation that Ofcom ‘did too little’ will carry far more political weight than the quieter argument that it may have done too much.

The danger to journalism and free speech is crystal clear. It will not appear as shuttered newsrooms or police raids on editors. It will manifest as stories that struggle to circulate, as accounts quietly suspended during ‘review’, as algorithmic downranking justified in the language of compliance. It will appear as a gradual narrowing of the space in which robust dissent can flourish without friction.

Investigative journalism depends on secure communication and confidential sources. If regulatory expectations weaken encryption or incentivise scanning regimes that erode anonymity, the chilling effect will not be confined to criminals. It will reach into newsrooms. Whistleblowers rarely come forward if they believe their communications may be subject to expanded scrutiny.

The deeper constitutional concern is this: has Britain created a censorship ministry? Ofcom has become a powerful systemic regulator whose codes and guidance will shape the design of the digital public square. The architecture of that square will determine how easily investigative reporting circulates, how securely sources can communicate, and how freely citizens can debate contentious issues.

Baroness Hodge’s potential appointment therefore crystallises a larger question. As Ofcom enters this expanded phase of its existence — larger, more powerful and more politically salient than at any point in its history — will it consciously embed freedom of expression as a co-equal principle alongside safety? Or will safety, under political and cultural pressure, become the dominant lens through which its new powers are exercised?

Ofcom is no longer a relatively contained broadcast watchdog. It is becoming one of the central nodes in Britain’s speech governance architecture. That transformation alone makes the choice of its leadership — and the philosophy that leadership embodies — a matter of huge public interest.