Now look here, if you’re going to call yourself an LGBT station you had damn well better be an LGBT station. You can’t just idennify as one and then kick back and relax, you know, it simply won’t do.

The head of a Belfast LGBT radio station has called a ruling that it does not broadcast enough programmes for the LGBT community “truly baffling”.

The broadcasting regulator Ofcom found Juice Radio to be in breach of some of its “key commitments” of service.

Ofcom said Juice Radio aired “a very limited amount of specialist programming for the LGBT+ community, rather than a service specifically for that community”.

Being on the other side of the planet, I don’t quite see what’s at stake here. What even is an “LGBT” radio station? Is it just that they call themselves that? Does it matter? Does it need regulating?

In 2022, Ofcom had previously ruled that Juice “was not meeting its requirement to broadcast LGBT anthems as part of its music output,” and was instead a “dance music service”.

Anthems? There’s a requirement to broadcast anthems?

Juice is a community radio station based in Belfast which broadcasts online and on FM. It was set up to serve “the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Belfast,” according to the commitments in its licence.

“Juice exists to create a community for people of all ages who identify as LGBT to showcase and discuss the aspirations, concerns, successes and issues affecting them,” its commitments state.

What more do you want? They say they exist to create a communinny. Job done! Call yourself a communinny, you are a communniny. Next case?

But Ofcom ruled that the vast majority of Juice’s output could not be distinguished from a “mainstream” radio service. “The speech content we listened to consisted heavily of presenters announcing the music being broadcast within the hour,” the regulator’s judgement said.

“A small amount of content was clearly for the station’s target community,” Ofcom said, but “there was little to no content to signpost to the listener that service was specifically targeted at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Belfast. It was not clear from listening to the content on-air that the service targeted the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Belfast.

“This therefore suggested that Juice FM Belfast was a general service broadcasting a very limited amount of specialist programming for the LGBT+ community, rather than a service specifically for that community.”

Do we think they said the C word enough times?

H/t Acolyte of Sagan