he Mess at the BBC Will Never End
Last week, the Daily Telegraph—the traditional newspaper of Britain’s conservative élite—reported on the existence of a secret memo that appeared to shatter the illusion that the BBC is an impartial news organization. The memo, some eight thousand words long, took the form of a letter to the BBC’s board and was written by Michael Prescott, a recent editorial adviser to the broadcaster. Prescott is a former journalist at the London Sunday Times. In the letter, Prescott attested that he did “not hold any hard and fast views” on U.S. politics, or on the Middle East, nor did he have any political agenda at all. But, after three years as an adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, he had been driven to despair by the broadcaster’s refusal to address deep-seated problems with its news coverage. The letter was a tour of recent mishaps, a guide to chronic bias in four distinct but connected zones: the BBC’s coverage of President Donald Trump, racial diversity, gender issues, and the war in Gaza. “From what I witnessed,” Prescott wrote, “I fear the problems could be even more widespread than this summary might suggest.” For those inside and outside the U.K. who resent the BBC, or regard it as smug, woke, and metropolitan-inclined, Prescott hit all the right notes.
The Daily Telegraph published Prescott’s letter, in full, last Thursday, at which point it leaped to the top of the British right-wing news agenda. The BBC—like well-meaning, bureaucratic legacy institutions everywhere—prevaricated and disagreed, internally, about how best to respond. The incidents and reporting failures that Prescott described, dating back several years, were all real. But many of them had already been investigated and acted upon. Some had been barely noticed, if at all, outside the organization. For example, Prescott singled out a documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance?,” that was broadcast by the BBC’s “Panorama” show last fall. During the making of the program, Trump’s “fight like hell” speech, from the morning of January 6, 2021, was edited, with the result that it made it sound like the President was inciting violence, and urging supporters to storm the Capitol, more directly than he actually had. A twelve-second clip spliced together two sentences that Trump had said fifty-four minutes apart. No viewers complained, and when the issue was raised, twice, at committee meetings that Prescott attended, BBC executives defended the edit, arguing that the documentary was summarizing well-known events, rather than reporting on them for the first time. Prescott, however, was appalled. “If BBC journalists are to be allowed to edit video in order to make people ‘say’ things they never actually said,” he wrote, “then what value are the Corporation’s guidelines, why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?”
People of good faith can disagree—and hard—about editorial judgments. The BBC calls itself the leading public broadcaster in the world. In British political conversation, its news operation—which accounts for about ten per cent of its over-all budget—occupies a position very roughly analogous to that of the New York Times in the U.S. It is capacious, authoritative, somewhat progressive, often annoying, and occasionally totally wrongheaded. If you are fond of the BBC, or are basically sympathetic to the project of public-service broadcasting, then you can spend a lot of time arguing about whether its errors are genuine mistakes or the expression of deeper world views or bad leadership. As a fairly avid consumer of BBC content, I agreed with some of Prescott’s criticisms, and could see how tough those issues—particularly about its Arabic-language output, which has been accused of anti-Israel bias—would be to resolve.
But if you can’t stand the BBC, or want to see it dramatically weakened, then you don’t have to waste time thinking carefully about these questions. The day after the Telegraph published Prescott’s memo, Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, who is now a columnist for the Daily Mail, declared that he wouldn’t be paying his license fee—the £174.50 annual levy, per household, that funds the BBC—until the broadcaster either came clean about how it “doctored” Trump’s speech, or its director general, Tim Davie, resigned. The same day, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, described the broadcaster “as total, 100 percent fake news” and “a Leftist propaganda machine.”
Over the weekend, Auntie—as the BBC used to be known, for its prudish, familiar, and slightly condescending ways—imploded. Both the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, and Davie, its over-all leader, announced that they would resign. Trump celebrated the news on Truth Social. “These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election,” he wrote. “On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!” On Monday, he threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars.
The BBC has bust-ups in its makeup. It has a deep and complex relationship with both the state and the people that it serves. (The BBC World Service broadcasts in forty-two languages, and the BBC, as a whole, claims to reach some four hundred and fifty million people every week.) Three of the past five directors general have resigned after one controversy or another. But, this century at least, the crises have tended to follow either an egregious editorial mistake or a conflict with outside forces, as in 2004, when the BBC clashed with the government over the case for the war in Iraq. What is unusual about the current crisis is that it was instigated, at least partly, from within. According to reporting in the Guardian and the Observer, Prescott was hired as an adviser to the BBC on the advice of Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative press secretary, who is one of five political appointees on the board of the broadcaster. Before Gibb joined the BBC, under Johnson’s government, back in 2021, he helped to set up GB News, a right-wing cable-news channel. For years, he has been on a mission to undo the BBC’s perceived liberal bias, challenging appointments and questioning its coverage. “Gibb’s supporters say he is trying to save the BBC from itself,” the Observer reported. “He was also heard last year to say that if he didn’t get his way, he would ‘blow the place up.’ ”
On Monday, I spoke to David Hendy, the author of “The BBC: A Century on Air,” which chronicles the first century of the corporation. Hendy, who is devoted to the BBC, likes to compare the organization to a Saturn V rocket. It has “a million moving parts, roughly one per cent of which will fail,” he told me. “And that one per cent means actually quite a lot of failures.” Like others, Hendy recognized that the systems that the BBC has designed to make itself accountable—its boards and committees, its standards and guidelines—make it more vulnerable and ponderous when it comes under determined attack.
It is also much weaker than it used to be. The BBC suffered a thirty-per-cent cut, in real terms, to its budget between 2010 and 2024, under the Conservative government, and it is frequently undermined by politicians of all sides. On Sunday, when the broadcaster was being assailed by both the White House and the right-wing press in the U.K., Lisa Nandy, the Labour minister who currently oversees the funding of the BBC, was hardly reassuring. Nandy said that the editing of Trump’s speech was “very serious,” and she aired her own concerns about the BBC operating in an environment “where news and fact is often blurred with polemic and opinion, and I think that is creating a very, very dangerous environment in this country where people can’t trust what they see.”
In such a climate, Hendy said, it wasn’t a surprise that the BBC has become overly defensive. “It is afraid to own up to its mistakes,” he told me. “It’s one of these organizations that is damned if it owns up and damned if it doesn’t.” But Hendy also drew a distinction between a good-faith critique of the national broadcaster and a bad-faith one. He said, of Prescott’s leaked letter, “It seems to me that it’s not trying to make the BBC good or honest by pointing out some of these mistakes or failures. It feels as if it’s a criticism which is designed to undermine the BBC as a whole.”
At this moment, no one knows whether Prescott’s motive was to strengthen the broadcaster or to weaken it further—maybe not even Prescott himself. It doesn’t matter now. As of Monday, Auntie was in mortified damage-control mode. The chair of the board, Samir Shah, apologized for an “error of judgement” in the editing of Trump’s January 6th speech and promised that every item listed in Prescott’s memo would be investigated—and reinvestigated—if necessary. The Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, of which Prescott was an adviser for three years, will be redesigned. There will be a new chief executive of BBC News. There will be a new director general. There will be more rules. There will be more mistakes. There will be more bias—imagined, systemic, or otherwise.
None of this is enough for people who want the BBC dismantled, of course. And it never will be. After the resignations—or the coup, as some ardent BBC defenders have called it—Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservatives, said that the corporation could no longer expect to be funded by the license fee unless it could demonstrate “true impartiality,” a chimera if ever there was one. Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform U.K. Party, who has his own show on GB News, says that, if he becomes Prime Minister, he will defund the BBC. As an organization that is, at its heart, a collectivist—almost a utopian—endeavor, the BBC desperately needs the public to believe in it. On Tuesday morning, Davie, the director general, addressed the organization’s twenty-one thousand staff. “I’m fiercely proud of this organization,” he said. “There are difficult times it goes through, but it just does good work. And that speaks—it speaks louder than any newspaper, any weaponization.” He allowed himself a flash of idealism in the dark. “We are the very best of what I think we should be as a society,” Davie said. If only society agreed. ♦
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