The BBC is adept at turning minor crises into major ones (Tim Davie resigns as BBC director general after accusations of ‘serious and systemic’ bias in coverage, 9 November). Thanks to a cumbersome, top-heavy structure, in the event of a crisis, inertia rapidly sets in as warring factions fail to agree action, thus losing control of it altogether as it spills out into the wider media.
Layers of editorial oversight also undermine trust and infantilise those whose judgment matters most, the programme makers.
When I joined Channel 4 in the 1990s, the organisational chart was a model of simplicity: a director of programmes with two controllers and a team of commissioners for each content area – total transparency about who was responsible for which programme.
There was nowhere to hide. Crises were sorted out in the blink of an eye. A slimmer, flatter BBC would work better for everyone and save a shedload of licence fee for more and better content.
Peter Grimsdale
Former BBC and Channel 4 executive, Dulwich, London
• As your leader (10 November) rightly says, Britain must stand up for the BBC before it loses the power to tell the truth. The line from Deborah Turness – the head of BBC News who resigned along with Tim Davie – that BBC journalists should “pursue the truth with no agenda” sounds noble, but is flawed. Everyone and every institution has an agenda – the purposes and responsibilities that guide action.
In a post-truth, attention-driven world, impartiality cannot mean detachment. The right goal is to pursue the truth with the deliberate agenda of accuracy, fairness, proportion and service to the public good. When broadcasters deny having any agenda, they leave truth undefended against those whose loud or manipulative ones dominate – as the latest attacks from President Trump and his allies show.
Anthony Lawton
Church Langton, Leicestershire
• I presented the BBC Radio 2 folk show for many years, and did so proudly. I still think the BBC is the finest public broadcasting service in the world and the people I worked with – techies, producers, directors – all worked for the love of their craft and the institution they were part of.
I wish I could say the same for the management, who were often “safe” placemen and -women, many of them with no real affection for the BBC. It was just a job, well paid and powerful. Couple that with the rabid hatred that the right have for anything that dares to speak truth to power, and add the current populist cadre of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage et al, and I’m not sure that, without a massive push from those who care, the wreckers can be thwarted.
Mike Harding
Settle, North Yorkshire
• In the US, we have watched every one of our once reliable news sources first pulled down, then abused, and finally sold off. The same is now happening to the BBC – it is going to face constant attack until it becomes a shadow of what it was. Who will this benefit? The war of media control is what we in the US have lost, and what you in the UK seem to be willing to lose. And for what?
Larry Marchant
Glen Allen, Virginia, US
• I cannot be alone in thinking that the BBC has strong grounds to countersue President Trump and his press secretary. To call the BBC “100% fake news” and its journalists “corrupt” looks, on the face of it, defamatory. The reputational damage must be immense, if unchallenged.
Alec Hamilton
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
• Surely the clearest indication of the BBC’s fundamental truthfulness and integrity is the number of known liars who wish to destroy it.
Isabella Stone
Sheffield
• Every cloud has a silver lining. All the leading candidates to replace Tim Davie at the BBC are women (Who could replace Tim Davie as BBC director general?, 10 November).
Matthew Ryder
Buckden, Cambridgeshire
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