Listen, I hate to ruin a yarn wall but I don’t think it’s at all helpful to start framing the current crisis at the BBC as a giant conspiracy or coup by dark rightwing forces, and get stuck in the weeds of that. The fact is, the three mistakes that form the bulk of Michael Prescott’s explosive leaked memo about impartiality – the Panorama edit, issues with coverage of the transgender issue and bias in the BBC Arabic service – happened and are bad. Given their spectacular fallout and the highest-level scalps that have been claimed, the opportunity to now deal with them might as well be taken by what is, let’s not forget, the most trusted news organisation in the world.
There is no news organisation in the United States that reaches more than 25% of people in a week. BBC News reaches 74% of UK adults in a week. There is vastly more distrust of news brands in the US. We in Britain live in a country with a far less polarised news market than almost anywhere else, in a world where 70% of people don’t even have a free press. This is great, whatever you might be told by Nigel Farage – a political leader who’s gunning to be the next PM but still presents a nightly current affairs show on GB News like that isn’t a massive conflict of interest and we live in Russia or something. Thanks for dialling in, Mr Ethics!
Alas, he won’t stop dialling in on this BBC story. You might recall that when supporters of Donald Trump’s total lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him stormed the Capitol, Nigel offered a single autofill-style tweet of condemnation. Imagine having a mere nine words to offer on violent scenes which called into question the peaceful transfer of power in American democracy, but at least 9,000 to offer, so far, on a bad documentary edit for which a telly producer and editor should have been promptly fired.
But we are where we are, and the BBC is in a place where the US president is threatening to sue it for a Dr Evil-esque $1bn. Not here, I don’t think, although British libel laws have long favoured claimants. The former Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar won in our libel courts over match-fixing and bribery claims, despite there being a video of him regretting accidentally making a save in which he said: “I dived the wrong way and it fucking hit my hand. In the Man United game, do you know how much I lost? A hundred and twenty-five fucking thousand pounds in cash.” As I say, Grobbelaar won this case.
But British libel law is based on the notion that someone’s reputation has suffered material harm. Were Trump to sue the BBC in our courts, the US president’s case against would presumably be based on the notion that he – a convicted felon found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a hush money case; a civil case loser found to have sexually abused a woman and been ordered to pay her $83m – had reputational damage done to him by the editing of a clip in a documentary that aired in another country, which no one noticed at the time, shortly before he won a landslide presidential election victory. Righto. Along with the fact that this only came to light just after the one-year UK libel limit had elapsed, you’d assume this is why Trump’s counsel is hinting at suing in Florida.
The Florida courts are a different kettle of fish. Florida is where Trump’s former friend Jeffrey Epstein got his plea deal so he could serve 13 months in an open prison then be free to sex traffic and abuse underage girls for another decade. Then again, Florida was also where Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay $148m after losing a defamation action to two Georgia election watchers. Then again, again, Trump on Tuesday pardoned Giuliani and other cronies for their efforts to subvert the 2020 election. What an endlessly intriguing legal system they do have over there.
As for over here – Donald, you don’t even go here – it’s genuinely nuts to hear politicians and commentators honking about how the next director general of the BBC has to be some cleanskin from the world of business. Sorry, what person from “business”? Wake up. In the old days, the second a DG had been defenestrated, you’d see lists of deeply keen runners and riders, heavily briefed by those throwing their hats in the ring. This morning the papers contain scant, half-hearted rundowns of potential candidates who in many cases everyone already knows wouldn’t want the job. People in the private sector don’t have to live in the eye of the firestorm, every day, and they get paid vast multiples more money. The only comparable level of flak in public life to running the BBC, outside of politics, is copped by tech bosses. Tech bosses get paid billions, effectively own their own companies and demonstrably could not give a toss when called out by politicians, because they are so, so much more powerful than them. Just over a year ago, Meta overlord Mark Zuckerberg declared that his previous willingness to apologise for errors was a “political miscalculation” and a “20-year mistake”. Yeah, maybe we should get someone from the “I’m done saying sorry” sector to run the BBC. Feels like a great fit. I’m sure they’d do it!
As for who should do it … I don’t pick the next director general – a baffling oversight – but if I did, I’d try to persuade Mark Thompson back for a second, maybe enticingly time-limited stint in the role he has previously held, at an organisation whose strength and weaknesses he would be tough and clear-sighted about. Think of it as a one-last-job movie, Mr Thompson. The next DG is probably going to have to have significant news experience, given the circumstances of this current crisis, as well as a deep understanding of the BBC from both the inside and the outside, as Thompson certainly has from his time there, then as CEO of the New York Times and now CNN. Furthermore, Thompson has, bless him, now earned American levels of money, so might consider coming back to be one of the few hardmen left who could take on public service in these rapidly enshittifying times.
But as I say, more and more high-calibre people are picking a quiet life over public service. And it’s harder every day to seem surprised. Be you a potential British politician or director general, why would you want to live under constant attack by bad-faith rivals who wish you out of existence? Why would you want your permanent coordinates to be in the eye of trouble? Why would you want to be subject to endless threats of violence on social media platforms whose proprietors explicitly couldn’t care less? Why would you not simply … do something else, for massively more money?
This, not events at the BBC, is the much more widespread crisis in public life. The BBC just makes it more obvious because it’s the last place anyone still resigns from. You almost never see politicians doing it any more – they wait to be sacked, or butch out the most awful mistakes, and get away with it because there aren’t legions of better people to replace them. More and more, the nature of high-profile public service is repelling the best and the brightest. That is the great tragedy of our age – and the great opportunity for those who were never in it to serve the public in the first place.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
