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.

When Israel bombarded Beirut on 27 September, killing hundreds of people, the BBC headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’. ITV News had ‘strikes hit Beirut’ and Sky ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for al-Jazeera’s straightforward and accurate statement: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). Yesterday evening, by contrast, the BBC headline was: ‘Iran launches barrage of missiles at Israel.’

The Israeli army’s targeted hit on an aid convoy in Gaza that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers featured on the front page of every UK national newspaper (apart from the Daily Star) on 3 April. It was the first time that Gaza had dominated all the front pages since the weeks immediately following Hamas’s attack on 7 October, and it took the murder of mostly white people to focus the papers’ attention.

With the resignation of Tony Hall as director general, there is talk of an ‘existential crisis’ at the BBC. The corporation is facing yet more budget cuts and the further centralisation of commissioning. Hall’s departure follows Boris Johnson’s threat to boycott the Today programme and Samira Ahmed’s successful equal pay claim. The prime minister and his consigliere Dominic Cummings are said to want to intervene in the appointment of the new director general. Who will come to the BBC’s rescue?

What do you call the premeditated murder of 59 people by a heavily armed civilian? News media appear to have settled on the phrase ‘mass shooting’, avoiding the more incendiary term ‘terrorism’ because, we are told, there is no obvious motive behind the shooter’s actions. Masha Gessen in the New Yorkerurges us not to describe this as an act of terror because, so far, ‘no evidence has emerged that the Las Vegas shooter was motivated by political beliefs.’ Scott Shane in the New York Timesagreed that the ‘mass killing of innocents, even on the scale of Las Vegas, does not automatically meet the generally accepted definition of terrorism, which requires a political, ideological or religious motive.’