ITV rapped for Judith Chalmers’ comments about Travel Republic

Tuesday, 17 Dec, 2019 0

ITV’s Good Morning Britain was found to have breached broadcasting rules with an interview featuring Judith Chalmers in which she favourably mentioned Travel Republic.

The 84-year-old former presenter of ‘Wish You Were Here…?’ has links with the online travel agent, having teamed up earlier this year to explore the extremes of ‘woke and wellness’ trends in a series of humorous videos called ‘Woke You Were Here…?’

Research commissioned by Travel Republic revealed Chalmers as the nation’s all-time leading TV travel icon.

Chalmers was interviewed by Kate Garraway and Ben Shephard on Good Morning Britain back in July and referred to Travel Republic, stating that ‘they sell 300,000 holidays a year’ and saying ‘it’s a marvellous company’.

Following a complaint, Ofcom investigated and agreed that the programme breached rules that ‘products, services and trademarks must not be promoted in programming’ and that ‘no undue prominence may be given in programming to a product, service or trademark’.

An Ofcom spokeswoman said: "Our investigation found that an interviewee on this programme made promotional statements about an online travel agent, to which she was commercially linked, without sufficient editorial justification."

In its defence, ITV said Shephard had tried to move the conversation away from the topic by saying ‘Sounds great’, but Ofcom believed the comment had the effect of appearing to confirm the comments, rather than shift focus away from them.

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Bev

Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.

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