It is telling, as well as poignantly ironic, that by far the most rigorous and informed debate about the crisis at the BBC should have been conducted… on the BBC. Its various news channels have excelled themselves. It is impossible to imagine any other media organisation subjecting itself in such a near-masochistic fashion to external scrutiny.
Wags joke about BBC presenters in the BBC newsroom interviewing a BBC reporter outside the BBC to ask what the feeling is among journalists inside the BBC. Yet this is what accountability looks like.
Those from every lobby group and vested interest have been allowed to vent their anger and more or less slander the very people they were speaking to, usually without interruption. The BBC News channel carried, yet again, a Nigel Farage event in which he loudly proclaimed that the BBC has for decades been “institutionally biased”.
The corporation is certainly responsible for a grave failing in the way one edition of Panorama was edited, but the chair, Samir Shah, has acknowledged the error of judgement and apologised for it. To the extent of that original mistake, the BBC has caused itself this grief. An overly slow and complacent response to allegations of bias was no doubt also another self-inflicted wound, contributing to present convulsions. Yet the BBC has proved remarkably open and penitent now, to the point of excess.
If it were possible to dig your own grave and then invite your worst enemies to have some champagne and dance all over it, then the BBC has certainly put on a spectacular show in recent days.
It is worth noting where the vested interests now persecuting the BBC are coming from. Most are on the hard right of politics, or their media allies. They resent the very idea of impartial reporting and balanced coverage of news events, and prefer the tendentious way they themselves cover and comment on stories – with zero sense of self-awareness.
It is beyond satire that an organisation such as the loss-making GB News should be so sanctimonious about the BBC, a news organisation trusted across the world. This channel is stuffed full of former and serving Reform party and Tory MPs, MEPs and Farageist candidates with their very own shows: Mr Farage, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, Martin Daubney, Lee Anderson and Michelle Dewberry, to name them. Sometimes, they end up “interviewing” one another, in Pythonesque parody. They are in no position to lecture the BBC about balance and partiality.
Also worth making is a comparison with the scant way the British newspapers covered the hacking scandal so many of them were involved in – and the approach the BBC adopts to its own scandals. The BBC actually makes documentaries examining its failings.
When things go wrong at the BBC, the joke used to go, “deputy heads will roll” – but in recent years, it is directors general and chairs themselves who have done the right thing and put the institution and what it stands for before their own careers.
It may be that Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the outgoing director general and news CEO respectively, had an inkling that Donald Trump was preparing to sue the BBC for some outrageous sum, and that they recognised that the political row was making their future untenable and harming the BBC. On those grounds, they were right to quit.
In a fairer, more rational world, they should not have had to pay such a price for what, presumably, happened in the edit suite of an independent production company. It was indeed a calamitous error to edit President Trump’s notorious speech outside the Capitol on 6 January 2021. There was no need to splice Mr Trump’s “fight like hell” reference onto a comment made almost an hour earlier – the thrust of his remarks was clear enough to the crowd that day, such that a violent attack on Congress followed.
There are also objections that can be legitimately raised about some aspects of the way the BBC has covered the war in Gaza – but such objections come from every side in that conflict.
It is not true that the perception of BBC bias always flows in one direction, and many accuse the BBC of giving far too much airtime to Mr Farage, Zia Yusuf and other leading lights of Reform UK, with the suspicion that the corporation is being bullied by the threat of abolition into having them on virtually every programme from Question Time to Newsnight. It might be no great shock to hear Mr Anderson reading the shipping forecast one evening, concentrating on the conditions facing smaller vessels in the English Channel.
It has become a moral panic, and absurdly so, symbolised in Mr Trump threatening to sue the BBC for an outlandish $1bn (£759m) if it doesn’t apologise (again) and “retract” the offending edition of Panorama.
Things need to calm down – and that includes the BBC’s response, though it is too late to save Mr Davie and Ms Turness from the mob. The BBC is one of Britain’s few genuinely global brands. The World Service has been a literal signal of hope for political prisoners across the world’s totalitarian states; its educational and children’s programmes are an exemplar of their kind; at a time when local newspapers are dying, the BBC helps support accountability in councils; and its sport, entertainment, drama, wildlife and factual programming command national affection and global respect.
It generates enormous amounts of money for the country and inward investment. It may be a smaller player compared to the American majors in financial terms, but creatively, it is very much at least their equal.
Above all, its news and current affairs programming in every medium is trusted and truthful, whatever the exaggerated claims of its enemies. The BBC’s journalists, with vanishingly rare exceptions, have only one bias, and that is in favour of the truth. Some put their lives on the line for it. The searing coverage of its own travails is only the latest example of why the BBC is unique in the world – and worth defending.
One man is responsible for bringing the BBC so low – Boris Johnson
Donald Trump’s $1bn lawsuit won’t finish the BBC off – but Nigel Farage might
‘Back to basics’: Readers on the BBC’s future after Trump Panorama controversy
The BBC is in a fight for its survival. It’s time Keir Starmer paid attention
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