.jpeg)
The BBC
is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations,
it has given in
Jane
Martinson
The
corporation should have stood up to the Telegraph, Trump and the Tories. Now,
its enemies know how little it takes for it to fold
Sun 9 Nov
2025 19.38 GMT
The
resignation of the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, over accusations of bias
comes as a shock and leaves a gulf at the top of the corporation when it needs
leadership most. Davie stressed that the decision was his alone – neither the
board, nor even many of those who led the coordinated attack among rightwing
press and politicians expected it.
Now the
resignations of both Davie and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have shown
that baying for blood gets results.
The
biggest shock is that this saga began just a week ago with the leak of a
19-page “devastating memo” from Michael Prescott, a former political journalist
who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster, published in
the Telegraph. The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump,
making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage
privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive
influence on coverage of sex and gender. The Telegraph wrote that the BBC’s
very silence “proves there is a serious problem”. Meanwhile, the former UK
prime minister Boris Johnson’s “blast” at Nick Robinson, the only BBC staffer
to publicly fight back against the accusations, leads the Mail on Sunday, and
Donald Trump’s press secretary has called the BBC “100% fake news”
Leave to
one side for now the direct allegations about specific failures of BBC
coverage, and the BBC’s own baffling inability or unwillingness to defend
itself over the past week. But the row obscures the context that explains what
is, at the heart of the matter, a political campaign against the BBC that could
act as a textbook example of how to confuse and undermine the kind of
journalism that is, at the very least, aiming for impartiality in a sea of spin
and distortion.
Prescott
stresses he has never been a member of a political party and that his views “do
not come with any political agenda” in the introduction to his 8,000-word note.
Yet each criticism of BBC coverage comes from the anti-progressive culture-war
playbook.
For
example, he is “shocked” that after an hour-long Panorama documentary dealing
with Trump and the January 6 insurgency, there was no “similar, balancing”
programme about the Democrat presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. As someone
who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality told me, this is an
entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view
that led to airtime being given to climate denial.
Prescott
also accuses the BBC of amplifying “issues of racism”. Yet his own argument and
suggested source material undermines his own claims of neutrality. He cites a
2022 report by History Reclaimed, also published in the Telegraph, which
highlights four BBC programmes with “an overly simplistic and distorted
narrative about British colonial racism, slave-trading and its legacy”. While
some of its members are senior Oxbridge academics, History Reclaimed’s website
makes clear that the group was formed to counter “culture war” narratives in
the media that suggest British history is shameful.
Prescott
remains “mystified” that his requests for BBC producers and editors to meet the
report’s authors were ignored. Yet in its own review at the time, the BBC
concluded that History Reclaimed “cherrypicking a handful of examples or
highlighting genuine mistakes in thousands of hours of output on TV and radio
does not constitute analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content”.
Sadly,
there has been no corresponding BBC response to the rehashed criticism in
Prescott’s own extensive review of past complaints.
None of
this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the
Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an
hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was
subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection. The BBC is expected to
apologise on Monday over the Trump edit. That should have been enough.
Prescott’s
10 years as chief political correspondent and then political editor of the
Sunday Times must have also helped his laser focus on two issues in particular
that have divided even the BBC’s biggest supporters. Its reporting in Gaza,
specifically that of the BBC Arabic service – given greater prominence recently
not just because of the war but because of cuts in BBC News – has wounded many
in the Jewish community, while the BBC’s handling of trans rights has divided
even its own staff.
Yet pity
the BBC that, while tiptoeing not always gracefully through these editorial
minefields with thousands of hours of content, it has also to deal with enemies
from within.
Concerns
about an apparent conflict of interest were raised when Johnson appointed
Prescott to advise Ofcom over its new chair four years ago. Prescott, whose PR
firm Hanover was involved in advising media companies such as Sky, has also
been described as a friend of Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative government
head of communications who joined the BBC board after helping to launch the
rightwing news channel GB News. However, Prescott was allowed to continue in
that role, and a government spokesperson said on Prescott’s behalf that the
appointment was “fair and open and there are no conflicts of interest”. He was
later appointed external adviser to the BBC standards board.
Gibb
himself is understood to have written a long and critical note about BBC
coverage to the board in early September, a few weeks before Prescott. BBC
sources tell me that the chair, Samir Shah, immediately ordered Peter Johnston,
the director of editorial complaints and reviews, to work on a response and a
briefing was discussed at the board on 16 October.
So why
has the BBC so far said nothing, apart from letting it be known that Shah is
likely to apologise for the Trump edit when called to respond to the culture,
media and sport committee tomorrow?
Given the
sheer volume of the content it airs and criticism it receives, the BBC can
sometimes be forgiven for not wanting to stir passions further. But by spending
days insisting that it did not comment on “leaked documents”, the corporation
has simply looked weak and cowardly, just when it needs to be robust and brave.
October Films, the independent production company that made the Trump Panorama,
is said to be working on a film about Nigel Farage.
With many
of the criticisms already looked at and addressed internally, should it really
take so long to come out with a response? These are difficult times for the
BBC. About to enter into negotiations to renew its charter after more than a
decade of licence-fee cuts, it is also caught in political and economic
headwinds. Johnson’s threat to cancel his licence fee comes after 300,000 more
households did so over the past year.
Trump’s
threat of a lawsuit against the BBC follows his successful cowing of the US
media, with a succession of commercial broadcasters agreeing to pay damages on
the flimsiest of charges. The BBC must be independent of government and
political interference. But to do that, it needs the trust of everyone who pays
for its services.
In his
resignation letter, Davie pleads for a better future after 20 years at an
organisation he loves. “We should champion [the BBC],” he writes. “Not
weaponise it.” It feels as if this plea is already too late.
Jane
Martinson is professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member
of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. She
writes in a personal capacity
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário