The BBC Thought It Could Save Itself by Serving the Powerful. It Was Wrong

It’s not a good morning for the BBC. Following a week of damning headlines in the Telegraph, two of the corporation’s main characters have said they won’t be returning for another series. 

As I write, Beeb bods are drafting an apology on behalf of the entire corporation. But to whom, for what, and why? The answers to those questions will tell you all you need to know about the fragility of legacy media, where power over it now lies, and how we’ll see that power increasingly exercised in the future. 

The BBC, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, is “total, 100% fake news that should no longer be worth the time on the television screens of the great people of the United Kingdom”.

What the MAGA right wants, the MAGA right gets. Just forty-eight hours later, BBC director general Tim Davie and BBC news head Deborah Turness were history. They fell on their swords following a week of critical reporting in the Telegraph. 

There, amongst familiar gripes about Gaza and trans rights reporting, it was a 20-second video edit involving the world’s most powerful-slash-fragile ego that tolled the bell for Auntie’s top dogs. 

In a Panorama episode aired a week before the 2024 US Presidential election, Donald Trump’s speech during the 2021 Capitol riot was edited to make it appear that he’d encouraged violence amongst his supporters. That Trump did encourage violence amongst his supporters is, apparently, not the point. 

The issue is that he was portrayed as uttering a string of words he never did: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight, we fight like hell.” Those words appear to have been edited together from two parts of Trump’s speech, about 50 minutes apart. 

That is undoubtedly a failure of the BBC’s editorial processes. Not, by any means, the first. But this particular distortion of historic reality by the corporation – again, not by any means the first – is the one that has created a point of entry for an ascendant power that would love, more than anything, to destroy it. 

The influence and brand recognition of the world’s oldest, largest and most influential public broadcaster make it a valuable commodity. And its authority represents an irritant, if not a substantial block, to the ambitions of the techno-anarchists who’d prefer us all atomised into algorithm-determined misinformation cells. This is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for.

Here’s the rub, though. The BBC’s error, from a survival point of view, was breaking from its practiced game of distorting the history of the powerless, and instead messing with the big dogs it customarily serves. But the wider journalistic sin goes all the way back to the corporation’s charter, which enshrines the bogus notion of “impartiality” in its DNA. 

When it comes to politics, the BBC has never been just about the truth. Accuracy as a value comes below not taking sides in the corporation’s code. Reality, of course, very much has a side. And if your journalism is less concerned with the truth than pandering to every political faction, no matter how destructive, don’t come crying to me if power hits back when you fail to pander hard enough. 

There are further twists to this story, though. The Telegraph’s reporting is based on a leaked memo written to the BBC board by former independent external adviser Michael Prescott. He’s said to be a friend of former prime minister Theresa May’s then-communications secretary Robbie Gibb. 

In a classic spin of the revolving door, Gibb was appointed to the BBC Board under Boris Johnson’s regime. But not before also advising GB News prior to its launch earlier that year, and leading the mysterious consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle.

Since then, it’s been alleged that Gibb has tried to politicise editorial appointments. More recently, 400 media figures signed a letter calling for his sacking over what they call his bias when it comes to the BBC’s reporting on Gaza. 

Gibb is said to have been instrumental in appointing Michael Prescott as editorial advisor to the Beeb. And in the past week, no one has come out swinging harder in support of Prescott’s claims than the man whose government injected Gibb into the BBC: Boris Johnson.