LBC pulled Myska after Israel interview
Sangita Myska says lawyers for LBC's owner monitored her social media after she quizzed an Israeli spokesman, and are still enforcing her silence.
Lawyers for LBC’s owner monitored Sangita Myska’s social media after she interviewed an Israeli government spokesman, and cited her “likes” on supportive tweets as an implied breach of contract, the broadcaster has revealed for the first time.
Myska made the claim in a Double Down News interview published on 11 August, her first detailed, on-the-record account since she vanished from LBC’s airwaves in April 2024. “The solicitors acting on behalf of Global and LBC told me they had been monitoring my social media,” she told interviewer Richard Sanders. “The implied threat was: if she carries on doing this, that’s a breach of contract.”
What she says happened
The monitoring, Myska says, was relayed not to her directly but to her own lawyers, an indirect warning dressed up as legal correspondence. The message landed while she was already barred by her contract’s confidentiality and non-disparagement terms, which she says apply “in perpetuity”, from explaining why she had gone off air at all. Two years on, Global has confirmed no settlement has been reached and the company declined to comment this week on the new claims. So did Myska herself, beyond the interview already on the record.
How it started
To understand why a broadcaster’s lawyers were reading a presenter’s Twitter likes, you have to go back to a single programme. On 14 April 2024, Myska interviewed Israeli government spokesman Avi Hyman live on LBC, days after Iran fired missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for the strike on Iran’s consular annex in Damascus that was widely attributed to Israel. She put the sequence of escalation to Hyman directly; he called her questions “outrageous”. Within 48 hours she was pulled from the schedule and never came back.
Global’s explanation, offered on 1 May 2024 and unchanged since, was a “refreshed weekend schedule”. Myska has never publicly disputed that timeline in a legal sense, and is explicit that her contract stops her drawing a straight line between the interview and her removal. What she can say is what happened next: 25,000 to 40,000 people signed a Change.org petition for her reinstatement, and more than 170 journalists and public figures, including ITV’s James Mates, Sky’s Alex Crawford, the BBC’s Lyse Doucet and Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum, signed an open letter demanding an explanation for her “sudden disappearance”.
Silenced, then blamed for the silence
That explanation never came, because the same clause that stopped Global answering also stopped Myska. Into that vacuum stepped a colleague. On air on 13 March 2025, LBC’s James O’Brien said Myska had chosen to stay silent about her departure and had let “antisemitic conspiracy theories” fester as a result, framing her enforced silence as her own decision. Her solicitors, Bindmans, issued a formal statement rejecting the characterisation and confirming, again, that she remained contractually barred from responding. Myska says online attacks from figures linked to the station continued for months afterwards, stopping only in June 2025, after she instructed a second set of lawyers to send legal letters.
The pattern is the story: a broadcaster’s standard confidentiality clause did the work of protecting the company’s silence, then a colleague filled the gap with an account that could not be answered, and it took a second round of lawyers to make the attacks stop. “I completely fell apart,” Myska says of the period.
What isn’t proven, and what is
None of this should be overstated. Myska has never alleged a direct causal link between the Hyman interview and her removal, and the piece should follow her lead: the fact that survives scrutiny is the 48-hour gap, not a confirmed motive. Confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses of this kind are ordinary in UK broadcasting contracts, not unique to her case. A figure sometimes cited for her audience growth under 12.5 per cent has not been independently checked against RAJAR data here and should not be treated as settled. And Global’s account of the social media monitoring has not been corroborated by a document such as the solicitor’s letter itself; it is, for now, Myska’s word.
What is not ordinary is the scope she describes: a gag clause with no expiry, enforced, on her account, by lawyers reading a sacked presenter’s likes for evidence of dissent. A confidentiality clause that outlives the contract by two years and counting is not a standard HR tool. It is a company deciding, indefinitely, who gets to tell this story.
Who pays
Global keeps its “refreshed schedule” line, undisturbed by two years of petitions, an open letter signed by some of British broadcasting’s biggest names, and now this. Myska keeps working, for Middle East Eye, The Nerve and Zeteo UK, where she says she has faced no editorial interference at all. No settlement exists. No document has surfaced to confirm what her former employer’s lawyers were watching, or why. What is confirmed is simpler: a journalist asked an Israeli government spokesman hard questions on live radio, and has not been allowed to say what happened to her since.
