The former BBC journalist Mishal Husain has said the current crisis at the corporation feels “existential”, as executives prepare to be questioned about it in the House of Commons early next week.
The Bloomberg editor-at-large also told its Forecast newsletter the director general role was “too vast” for one person.
“What is at stake now is well beyond the BBC and speaks to the challenges of maintaining trust in our polarised age,” she said. “I did see serious issues play out from the inside. This one … feels existential,” she said.
MPs and BBC staff members have called for Robbie Gibb, a board member and former Conservative No 10 press secretary facing accusations of a rightwing coup, to be removed from the corporation’s board after the resignation of two of its most senior executives: the director general, Tim Davie; and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of news.
“The director general is both chief executive and editor-in-chief, responsible for more than 5,000 journalists all over the world, a remit perhaps too vast for any one person,” Husain said.
She called for “courage” to introduce a new system at the public broadcaster that separated it from government.
“In increasingly divided societies, national institutions need to inspire trust across a large segment of the population, and yet several members of the BBC board – including the chair – are appointed by the government of the day,” Husain said.
“Now is the time for courage, for a non-partisan system of board appointments as well as continued accountability to the public. I’d argue that matters beyond the UK’s borders: it is far easier to pick apart institutions than focus on making them fit for our fractious age, and for the future.”
At a culture, media and sport committee hearing next Monday, the BBC’s chair, Samir Shah, and the non-executive directors Gibb and Caroline Thomson are expected to give evidence about editorial standards at the public broadcaster.
Also invited is the editorial standards adviser Michael Prescott, the author of a controversial report criticising BBC impartiality which highlighted an episode of Panorama featuring a misleading edit of a Donald Trump speech.
In the clip, which was 12 seconds long, two segments of the speech nearly an hour apart were put together. The president appeared to say: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
However, the verbatim quote from the speech was: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” More than 50 minutes later, he added: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The attack, which led to five deaths, including of a police officer, came shortly after Trump spoke at the “Save America” rally on 6 January.
A violent mob stormed the Capitol in Washington after Trump made false claims in the same speech that the 2020 election had been “stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats”.
The leaking of Prescott’s internal report brought accusations of bias at the broadcaster and led to the high-profile resignations.
In the aftermath, the US president said if he did not get an apology he would sue the BBC over the edit of the episode of Panorama from last year about the Capitol riot in 2021.
When the BBC legal team issued an apology at the end of last week, Trump told reporters he still planned to take legal action, saying: “We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and $5bn, probably sometime next week. We have to do it.”
