This Monday, the BBC4 morning radio program reported on the resignation of senior leaders in the public sector, interviewing critics and defenders and questioning why the channel’s boss did not allow an interview straight away (he did an interview on public television a few hours later). Few media outlets in the world, especially outside the United Kingdom and the United States, pass this test of reporting themselves accurately and critically.
Once again, the BBC finds itself in the middle of a controversy over the resignation of Tim Davie, director general, and Deborah Torness, chief news officer, after the publication of an internal complaint that accused the network of failing to act over incorrect editing of a segment of a program about Donald Trump just days before the 2024 presidential election, and pro-Palestinian and pro-transgender bias. The tone of the words of the memo written a few months ago by an independent consultant to the BBC and now published by the conservative newspaper Telegraph He echoes some common complaints of the Anglo-Saxon right.
What has happened in the past few hours is a reminder that even the BBC’s protective filters to uphold its independence from political power can crack in the current cutthroat digital public space, which in the UK has become increasingly poisoned by US debates and some of its figures, particularly Elon Musk, who funds the promotion of more extreme right-wing voices on his network, according to a Sky News investigation.
Moreover, the threat of a libel lawsuit by Trump worth up to $1 billion (over 860 million euros) against the BBC is even more worrying than in the United States, because in the United Kingdom there is no equivalent of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that grants broad freedom of expression protection or the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court that has for decades protected information even when it is false.
On Monday, morning radio presenter Nick Robinson also questioned BBC News’ interest in listeners’ lives. But the role of public broadcasting in the UK and beyond is unique in its scope and level of trust.
High confidence
In this time of polarization and constant questioning of the simplest facts, 60% of the public trusts the news they see, hear and read on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), according to data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. It is the medium with the highest trust rating in both the UK and the US, where TV’s reach is smaller, but its website also has a strong presence.
What sets the BBC apart is the combination of the size of its audience and the ideological diversity of its audience. In the UK, people who consider themselves centrist or left-wing trust the BBC the most – 67% – but almost half of those who describe themselves as conservative do too. In fact, conservatives trust BBC news more than they trust what they read on the internet. sun or Daily MailTwo fixed references on the right.
The BBC relies on a board of directors whose chair is appointed in a public process overseen, but not controlled, by the government, and made up of a group of journalists, lawyers, business people and other experts. His role is to publicly check that the BBC fulfills its mission to the highest editorial standards and respects its rules of impartiality, but does not interfere – or should not interfere – in the day-to-day management, which has so far relied on the director-general, Tim Davie. The BBC has to report regularly on adherence to its standards, and it responds to the media regulator (Ofcom, by its acronym in English), to a parliamentary committee and to viewers themselves, who can complain through a formal process that the BBC is obligated to attend and respond to.
Program
The current controversy, which led to the extraordinary resignations of Davie and Torness, began with a 19-page memo from the independent standards adviser, Michael Prescott, before he left office in June. The letter complained that Davey did not provide an adequate response to the documentary’s inappropriate editing. Trump: A second chance? (Trump: A second chance?) issued on November 2, 2024.
Prescott, who was a political journalist in Sunday Times He then worked for telecoms company BT and others in the sector, and was an independent standards consultant for three years. But the former journalist also revealed his biases in the letter.
The most specific complaint was about the program’s reporting panorama About how Trump returned to the front line after the attack on the Capitol, which caused the second attack isolationTwo lawsuits, one federal and one in Georgia, and a congressional investigative committee. The program included two sentences from Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021 next to the Capitol building, where his then-vice president, Mike Pence, was preparing to chair the certification session of the results of the 2020 presidential elections, which Joe Biden won. The BBC broadcast successively the phrase “We will march to the Capitol” and the one Trump said at another point in the speech about an hour later: “We will fight with all our might.”
Prescott complained that the series made “misleading” editing, but added that Trump was not charged with “incitement” of the assault specifically because of that phrase in the federal indictment against him, which was dropped after he won the election a year ago. However, he ignored the US Congress’ investigative report, which concluded in 2022 that Trump was to blame in a concerted effort to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Prescott also complained that the BBC did not broadcast an “equally offensive” report on Kamala Harris, then vice president and Democratic presidential nominee, who is not known to have engaged in anything similar.
Other complaints
When discussing transgender rights, Prescott wrote that coverage was “censored by its reporters” and that public broadcasting was “captive of a small group promoting the vision of Stonewall,” a reference to a New York bar that was a symbol of the struggle for gay rights in the last century.
Their complaints about coverage in Gaza are echoed in more detailed reports that say the BBC is biased against Israel, but also contradict others who say its bias is pro-Israel. The BBC says it has received a similar number of complaints from both sides. In one case in which it intervened, last October, Ofcom, the media regulator, said the network had violated its standards in a documentary in which the narrator was the son of a Hamas leader, who was not identified as such. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) removed the documentary from its platform last February.
Sorry late
BBC chief Samir Shah on Monday apologized for editing the Trump documentary, admitting a “lack of judgement” by the program when editing that part of the speech before the attack on the Capitol, but defended that the BBC was not biased and called the Prescott document a “personal opinion” that did not reflect the “full picture” of its coverage.
Shah was unable to send his intended message to Parliament a week earlier because some members of the Assembly delayed it, claiming that it was not clear enough. This delay increased the pressure, especially on news chief Deborah Turness, who had already offered her resignation on Saturday, according to what Reuters reported. observer. At that time, Davey decided to resign with her in solidarity.
he observer He questions the role of lead BBC board director Robbie Gibb, a former Tory spokesman who is backed by Boris Johnson’s government in 2021, to “dismantle what he sees as a progressive bias at the BBC”. Usually, as the weekly stresses, board members do not interfere in editorial decisions. In July, more than a hundred BBC journalists demanded his removal from the board due to a conflict of interest over Gaza coverage given his previous work at the BBC. Jewish historya London media outlet that presents itself as the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world.
“The intimidation that BBC defenders feared for years was taking place behind the scenes is now happening in broad daylight,” complains an editorial in the BBC newspaper. observerthe weekly newspaper is now owned by Tortoise Media, a media outlet founded and run by James Harding, the newspaper’s former editor. The times And the BBC News Department.
Neutrality rules
The BBC’s rules, especially in today’s world of instant reactions on social media, make it difficult to defend itself. The obstacles come from the fact that any reaction to criticism coming from politicians can be interpreted as a partisan confrontation, thus violating their rules of neutrality.
The BBC regularly interviews Trump allies – including personal friends – to comment on US political news, and a few days ago described New York’s new mayor, Zahran Mamdani, as a “far-left extremist”. The price of upsetting Trump or his entourage is especially high now, after the threat of a lawsuit and Trump’s insults.
Just hours after her resignation, Torness was clear on Monday in her defense of the BBC’s mission. She was also the first to respond to the attacks of Trump, who accused British radio and television journalists of “corruption” for “manipulating” what he said was a “perfect” speech he delivered on January 6, 2021.
“Of course our journalists are not corrupt,” said Torness, who had until now been a candidate for the position of potential director-general. “Our journalists are hard-working people who aspire to be impartial. I will defend their journalism.”
Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer and leaders of the far-right Conservative and Reform parties to defend the BBC against Trump’s attacks. A spokesman for Starmer said the network’s journalists were not corrupt and that there was no institutional bias, but avoided mentioning the US president.
The paradox of the UK media is that while the BBC is tightly regulated, careful with every word, and has to provide explanations for every decision, there is increasingly a mishmash of information and opinion in the rest of the press. One of the controversial issues that has not been resolved is that Nigel Farage, the MP and reform leader, is still a presenter on GB News. Regulator Ofcom, which also oversees rules for private networks, has decided not to intervene.
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