Whose BBC?

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.’