Whose BBC?
Des Freedman
From the revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012 to the gender pay gap debacle in 2017, the BBC was for many years its own worst enemy. Now, confronted with a rampaging US president and increasingly confident domestic opponents, some of whom sit on the corporation’s board, the BBC is embroiled in a crisis that has so far seen the resignations of two senior executives and the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit from Donald Trump.
The immediate trigger was a dossier of allegations of liberal bias that was leaked to the Daily Telegraph. Most prominent among them was Panorama’s editing of Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 to make it look as if the defeated president was directly calling for violence at the US Capitol. The programme certainly messed with his words but it’s far from clear that it misrepresented the overall impact of Trump’s behaviour on that day.
Dodgy splicing – or ‘Frankenstein editing’, as one BBC staff member described the Panorama case to me – isn’t usually sufficient to bring down the leadership. When the BBC changed the order of events in its coverage of the Battle of Orgreave during the 1984-85 miners’ strike to make it look as if the miners, rather than the police, had instigated the violence, the then assistant director general admitted that its report ‘might not have been wholly impartial’. But no heads rolled and no one’s career suffered. When a 2019 edition of Panorama re-edited interviews to make it look as if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was riddled with antisemites, the programme was nominated for a BAFTA.
This time it seems that the director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, were the victims of a sustained campaign by right-wing newspapers, backed by an assortment of Tory and Reform MPs, to destabilise the corporation. Unusually, these voices have a presence on the BBC board: Robbie Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May and self-declared Thatcherite, also sits on the editorial guidelines and standards committee that is supposed to ensure impartiality. It was his friend Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to that committee, who delivered the ‘dossier’ to the BBC board that sparked the current crisis.
By going out of its way to appease its critics on the right – by, for example, providing disproportionate coverage of Reform and amplifying right-wing talking points from social media – the BBC has only fuelled the forces that are set on undermining it. In a detailed account of its newsroom culture, Lewis Goodall, a former Newsnight policy editor, highlights ‘the BBC’s tendency to move, unthinkingly, to wherever received wisdom is at any given moment – something it will be doing again, but in a rightward direction, right now, given the ideological winds have shifted.’
For many people, this is one of the more baffling aspects of the whole episode. Why would an insurgent right want to remove a director general who was the former deputy chair of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservatives and a head of news who had done so much to tilt BBC output towards a Reform agenda? Why would they want to undermine a leadership that had presided over Gaza coverage that, according to the Centre for Media Monitoring, systematically amplified Israeli narratives and minimised Palestinian suffering? Why would they want to weaken a director general who refused to transmit a documentary on the targeting by Israeli forces of medical staff in Gaza – subsequently shown by Channel 4 – whose removal from the BBC caused significant disquiet, including among BBC staff?
The short answer is that the BBC could never do enough to satisfy its enemies on the right, who are as exercised by what the BBC represents – a ‘public service’ model in an increasingly commercial media landscape – as they are by what it says or does.
The insurgent right is far more comfortable with outlets owned by billionaire media moguls and tech oligarchs than with organisations that are formally accountable to and owned by the public. Given that our key communication platforms are controlled by US tech giants and, should Comcast complete its proposed takeover of ITV, the news outputs of ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky will effectively be in US hands, these attacks on public service – accentuated by Trump’s threat of legal action – should be fiercely resisted.
None of this means ignoring the BBC’s substantial flaws. If the corporation has a problem relating to ‘ordinary’ people, it isn’t because it’s packed with social justice warriors but because it’s disproportionately staffed, especially at an executive level, by privately educated university graduates, 26 per cent of whom went to Oxbridge. Concentrated in London, it is unwilling to hand meaningful power and resources to the devolved nations and regions. Its bureaucratic and hierarchical rigidity is borne out by its incapacity to react to the Telegraph dossier for a week while the board was locked in disagreement. When BBC staff must be desperately anxious about their future, the corporation’s chair, Samir Shah, used a ‘town hall’ event following the resignations to argue that it was ‘disrespectful’ to attack board members, a comment that enraged staff found ‘tone deaf’.
Forty-eight hours after the resignations, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told the House of Commons that ‘the BBC is not just a broadcaster; it is a national institution that belongs to us all.’ It is formally ‘our BBC’, as the corporation’s branding insists, but it doesn’t always feel that way. An opportunistic and dangerous attack on the principle of non-commercial media shouldn’t obscure the underlying structural problems with the corporation, its lack of meaningful independence from government, and the need for radical change.
There’s plenty to be getting on with: to demand that Gibb return to a career in PR, that the BBC refuse to pay Trump’s ransom and that the government be removed entirely from the corporation’s governance and funding decisions. But there also needs to be a thoroughgoing transformation of the BBC, perhaps by handing it over to the public in the way imagined by the Media Reform Coalition.
Next May will be the hundredth anniversary of the 1926 general strike, which presented the newly created BBC with its first test. Would it stand up to government and remain independent or would it acquiesce to power? As Lord Reith remarked in his diary, there was no need for the government to ‘commandeer’ the BBC because ‘they know that they can trust us not to be really impartial.’
Comments
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15 November 2025
at
2:12am
Graucho
says:
According to ChatGPT if Trump goes ahead and sues and it goes to court, the BBC can subpoena him. Having him cross examined by an able London KC should make for some riveting questioning. Stuff along the lines of, Mr. President, when you assembled the Proud Boys and told them that they were there to "Stop the steal" were you expecting them to stand outside the Capitol building holding hands and singing Kumbaya? The AI application also informs me that either side can request a jury trial. The president may well be pushing up daisies by the time an impartial one has been chosen given the current political climate.
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15 November 2025
at
9:35am
Caroline Hutton
says:
It all depends on the jurisdiction in which President Trump issues a claim. If in England the BBC would be defendant and could not "sub poena" the claimant but could, if the claimant provides a witness statement and gives oral evidence cross-examine him. What the law is in any particular US state - Florida? - in which the President might issue his claim about ordering a party to give oral evidence in court may well be another matter. In the UK it is possible to order jury trial of a libel claim but only in special circumstances. For reasons discussed by D A Green on his Sub-stack The Empty City there is highly unlikely to be any legal action
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15 November 2025
at
10:50am
John Plunk
says:
As Lewis Goodall rightly says, for all the endless debate over whether the BBC is right or left, its only consistent bias over the decades has been towards the establishment view, whatever that is at the time. Even its recent adoption of the identity agenda can be seen as small-c conservative: the aim is to fit each of us into a neat little box so we can "feel represented" by our assigned celebrity boxtickperson. Because if people don't feel represented, they might start wanting to represent themselves, and we can't have that, can we?
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15 November 2025
at
11:05am
Andrew
says:
As a lifetime Guardian reader, I'm tired of hearing that 'dodgy splicing' is not that serious. Yes, the right is hypocritical on the issue. Yes, the politics has all got out of hand. But as a consumer of news I need to be able to trust the sources of information that I rely on. The elementary point is that integrity and reliability matter. And having watched the edit, my trust in the BBC as an impartial and reliable source of news has been eroded. The political defences of the BBC are as misplaced and irrelevant as the purely political attacks.
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15 November 2025
at
11:18pm
sandra griffin
says:
I always was amused by Jen Psaki's projection of a false sense of consensus
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17 November 2025
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7:25pm
ljblog
says:
The "mutual" framework based on sortition is an excellent idea in principle. This model could, and should, be much more widely employed for public bodies. There are many potential drawbacks, and there will need to be institutional learning and evolution to make the model work, but it has the overriding advantage of being more resistant than other models to capture by either wealthy interests or temporarily influential political movements or parties - not to mention governments.
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17 November 2025
at
7:45pm
Graucho
says:
@Caroline Hutton
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17 November 2025
at
7:49pm
Graucho
says:
@Caroline Hutton
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20 November 2025
at
2:14am
James G king
says:
Oh come on, nobody, including Trump himself, who was conscious and mildly sentient at the time, could have any doubt about what he was up to on January 6. Nor should there be any doubt about his cosplaying tactic of suing anyone and everyone who ever tries to call him to account.
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21 November 2025
at
2:47pm
Harriet Guest
says:
much to agree with here. I thought BBC content was already made by a lot of smaller and more-or-less independent companies? it was one of these that made the contentious panorama, wasn' t it? Why wasn't that a line of defence? I see Netflix increasingly repeats and presumably pays for BBC and ITV content?
Read moreIt's painfully clear that the BBC can't cope with a situation where a sizeable chunk of the establishment – the Serious People BBC journos are supposed to defer to – is no longer committed to small-c conservatism. Mutualisation seems like an attractive solution, though its effects – if any – would clearly depend very much on how it was done.
"you and I both know Peter"
As they say, there's no room for truth on the internet, but it says ...
Yes, in a Florida libel case, the claimant (plaintiff) can be subpoenaed to give testimony. Subpoenas are a standard discovery tool in Florida civil cases, and they can be used to compel the attendance and testimony of witnesses, including the parties to the lawsuit.
P.S. Thank you for the Empty City reference, quite excellent piece.
What's strange about this - from my vantage point here in Canada - is why anybody in the UK - thousands of miles from North America - would find it useful to subvert the BBC (for whatever obscure political reason) by paying any attention to this nonsense.