Short answer: almost nobody regulates the news, and the little regulation that exists depends entirely on how the story reached you. Broadcast has rules with teeth. Print and online have a complaints desk. And in the United States, the whole idea of a content regulator runs into the First Amendment about four seconds after you propose it. * Here is the actual map, because "the media should be held accountable" means three completely different things in three different places. * UK BROADCAST: OFCOM, AND IT IS REAL * Ofcom is a statutory regulator — created by Parliament, with legal power over anyone holding a UK broadcast licence. Its Broadcasting Code includes Section 5, the "due impartiality" rules, which is why a British TV news programme feels structurally different from an American one. Since 3 April 2017, Ofcom has also been the BBC's first external regulator, ending the era of the BBC marking its own homework through the BBC Trust. * Ofcom can fine. In its ruling on GB News, it found that the programme "People's Forum: The Prime Minister", broadcast 12 February 2024, breached Rules 5.11 and 5.12 by giving then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a largely uncontested platform, and imposed a £100,000 penalty on GB News Limited. * It can also lose. In February 2025, the High Court quashed Ofcom's findings against two editions of Jacob Rees-Mogg's "State of the Nation" on GB News, ruling the regulator had acted unlawfully — the first time a broadcaster had beaten Ofcom this way in court. Ofcom subsequently said it would review aspects of the Broadcasting Code. Whatever you think of GB News, that judgment matters: it establishes that the impartiality rules are arguable in front of a judge, not handed down from a regulator's private certainty. * UK PRINT: IPSO, AND IT IS NOT * Newspapers are not licensed and Ofcom has no authority over them. What exists instead is IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, set up in September 2014 in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry and funded by the industry it regulates. It covers more than 1,500 print titles and over 1,000 digital publications, enforcing the Editors' Code of Practice — accuracy, privacy, harassment, reporting of suicide, and so on. * IPSO can order a correction and can require an adverse ruling to be published. On paper it can also fine a publisher up to £1 million for serious and systemic breaches. In practice it has not used that power. A review published by the Press Recognition Panel in May 2026 found IPSO has never launched a standards investigation or imposed significant sanctions on a publisher, even where a long-term pattern of wrongdoing was visible. * Three national titles do not belong to IPSO at all — the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Independent — and run their own readers' editor or ombudsman arrangements instead. The Leveson-compliant regulator, Impress, was formally recognised by the Press Recognition Panel in October 2016 and regulates around 231 publications, none of them a national newspaper. * So when a British tabloid gets a story badly wrong, the maximum realistic consequence is a correction the paper is required to print, in a position IPSO specifies. That is the whole ceiling. * THE US: THE FCC ONLY OWNS THE AIRWAVES * American press regulation barely exists by design. The First Amendment bars the government from restraining publication, and Section 326 of the Communications Act explicitly forbids the FCC from censoring broadcast content. What the FCC does have is licensing power over stations that use the public airwaves — over-the-air ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates, plus radio. Cable channels, newspapers, magazines and every website in the country are outside its reach entirely. That is why a cable network can say things a local affiliate cannot. * The exception the FCC keeps in its back pocket is the "news distortion" policy — the idea that a licensee deliberately staging or falsifying news can have its licence questioned. It is rarely invoked, and the current fight over it is instructive. In February 2025 the FCC, under Trump-appointed chairman Brendan Carr, reopened a news-distortion complaint against CBS over the editing of a "60 Minutes" interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump had separately sued CBS's parent, Paramount, for $20 billion; in July 2025 Paramount settled for $16 million covering fees and a donation to a future presidential library, with no apology and no retraction — while its $8 billion merger with Skydance sat awaiting FCC approval, which the agency granted later that month. A group of former FCC chairs has since urged the agency to repeal the news-distortion policy outright. * Read that sequence again slowly, because it explains what "regulating the news" turns into once a regulator also holds merger approval. The rule was never applied. It did not have to be. * WHAT ACTUALLY DISCIPLINES A NEWSROOM * Given all that, the real constraints on what an outlet prints are: defamation law, which is expensive and slow and only helps people who can afford lawyers; advertiser and subscriber pressure, which punishes offence rather than inaccuracy; and the outlet's own corrections policy, which is voluntary and varies enormously. * WHERE TO COMPLAIN, PRACTICALLY * In the UK, a TV or radio complaint goes to Ofcom, and Ofcom does publish its decisions. A newspaper complaint goes first to the paper, then to IPSO if it is a member, or to Impress for the smaller independents. In the US, a complaint about a broadcast station goes to the FCC and will almost certainly go nowhere on content grounds; for everything else your options are the outlet's own public editor, where one still exists, or the press. * The pattern is consistent across all three systems. Where the state licensed a scarce resource — the airwaves — it kept the power to enforce standards. Where the press simply bought paper and ink, it kept the power to police itself, and has been extremely reluctant to use it.