Extra edition: The populist assault on the BBC

Johnson, Gibb and the Telegraph are trying to turn the BBC into GB News.

New Broadcasting House, in Central London. Photo by Brooks DeCillia on Unsplash

What you’re witnessing is a populist assault on the BBC.

This is not an institutional scandal in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an attack on public service broadcasting.

For the time being, the details of why director general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness resigned are mysterious. Former Sun editor David Yelland - a friend of the BBC - says “elements” of the BBC Board have worked to undermine the leadership in a series of actions he has described as “nothing short of a coup”.

The details of what has happened may come out eventually. But the broad outline of events is already clear for those who have the eyes to see it. As prime minister Boris Johnson installed figures who hated the BBC into the corporation. Their allies are now key players in a media storm which has savagely undermined it.

In 2021, Johnson appointed Robbie Gibb to the BBC Board. Gibb has made no secret of his views. He served as director of communications when Theresa May was in Downing Street - a record which should have disbarred him from participation in the BBC on the basis of competence alone, let alone political objectivity. He then helped set up GB News, a proudly right-wing news channel which promotes conspiracy theories.

According to the Guardian, Gibb was key to the appointment of Michael Prescott as independent external adviser. Prescott is the author of the 8,000-word note on BBC editorial standards which lies behind this week’s events. He insists his views “do not come with any political agenda”, but the note is basically a series of right-wing culture war talking points. The Prescott note stitches together some genuine balls-ups, some utter fantasy nonsense and some cynically packaged insinuations into a full-spectrum attack on the corporation.

It found that the BBC put together two disparate moments from Donald Trump’s speech on the day of the insurrection, providing the following quote: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.” In fact, Trump had initially said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women”.

That’s a dodgy edit. It’s a cock-up. You need to be careful with ellipsis in text, or its equivalent in broadcast. Wherever you cut between bits of a quote without explanation, it is your responsibility to make sure of two things. First, that the reader knows two different sections have been used. In text, we use ellipses, in broadcast it generally flashes white for a moment. Second, that the missing section does not change the meaning of the published text. Where it does, even in a minor way, you have to include that section.

But perhaps we might remember a small niggling fact in all this. The overall point that Trump attempted an overthrow of American democracy is not in question. He spent months inventing conspiracy theories about the electoral results and then spread them through social media and supportive journalists. He attempted to coerce the vice president to fraudulently alter the election election results at the January 6th certification proceeding. He organised a mass demonstration of supporters, fired up by months of extremist conspiracy theory rhetoric and set them loose. People died. US democracy teetered on the brink. And yet these people care more about a sloppy edit on a dated Panorama programme. They are morally insane. Depraved. They have the intellectual substance of a used condom.

Elsewhere Prescott claims that the broadcaster had been “captured by a small group of [staff] promoting the Stonewall view” of gender identity issues. This is obviously utter hogwash, with the corporation regularly featuring debates on trans issues conducted in extremely robust terms.

He says pro-Hamas commentators have been used repeatedly on BBC Arabic. This claim seems to have more purchase and in fact was already the subject of internal action. And yet even here we need a sense of proportion. The BBC is an immense institution. In the time I’ve been writing this, it has put out multiple hours of content in its news department alone, across TV, local and national radio stations, online and the World Service. Each day, it unspools itself, hundreds upon hundreds of hours of material unleashed into the world, by an under-pressure organisation being pummelled by politicians and viewers.

So yes, it makes mistakes. It is very easy to simply grab one mistake, another from two months later and a third one from a year afterwards to suggest a pattern of behaviour. But if you were to visualise those errors as a proportion of the overall coverage, they would be specks of sand on a beach. They would look like what they are: inevitable media errors, which do not add up to a systematic problem.

All of this has a grotesque double-standard. I am now going to conduct an experiment. I am going to pick up a random copy of Private Eye from the bookshelf on the other side of the room. It’s the September 19th edition. Now I am going to pick three random stories from the media section. Here we go…

Item one: The Daily Mail, whose headline today says that “BBC Bosses Quit in Disgrace”, demanded in September that Peter Mandelson should be sacked as ambassador to the US. And yet it had previously co-hosted Mandelson’s drinks reception in Washington ahead of the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Item two: The Telegraph, which is jubilant over the BBC story today, recently celebrated its successful attack on deputy prime minister Angela Rayner. She resigned due to her failure to pay the correct amount of tax on one of her properties. One headline read: “How the Telegraph’s tenacious reporting led to Angela Rayner’s downfall”. And yet it has published numerous stories advising readers on how to dodge tax on a second home, including “How to swerve Labour’s stamp duty raid on second homes” and “How to avoid tax on your second home”.

Item three: The Telegraph recently published a comment piece by Jake Wallis Simons titled: “Publishing fake news about Israel needs to stop. It’s endangering lives.” And yet Simons recently left his job as editor of the Jewish Chronicle after it published various stories by freelancer Elon Perry which Israeli media concluded were fabrications. Gibb, incidentally, is purportedly the owner of the Chronicle. And yet he apparently is entitled to scream about editorial standards.

This is from one edition of Private Eye, and barely scratches the surface of its coverage. Over the course of a year, the examples would run into the hundreds. The errors and omission of right wing press operations are far more egregious, persistent and systematic than anything found in the BBC. And yet we exist in a system of profound double standards, where they can do whatever they like without consequence but the BBC’s slightest mistake is treated as an argument for its abolition.

The Prescott memo was ‘leaked’ to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. At this point the global populist right took over.

Boris Johnson went on the attack, vowing to stop paying his licence fee and launching personal broadsides against BBC journalists. He worked diligently to keep the news story alive, to keep it inching forward, day by day.

After the resignations last night they were all jubilant. Trump said: “The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught ‘doctoring’ my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th.” What a warrior for truth. In reality, Trump lies so often it is difficult, on a basic practical level, to verify what he says. He has repeatedly called for journalists to be sacked because of critical cover. His claims to speak about bias, misinformation or journalistic ethics are farcical.

Reform leader Nigel Farage said: “This is the BBC’s last chance. If they don’t get this right, there will be vast numbers of people refusing to pay the licence fee.” Another brave warrior for truth. In reality, Farage is a politician who sits as a host of a TV show on GB News, the most egregious and blatant demonstration of bias it is possible to imagine.

We do not have proof of what happened here and we do not have details. We do not know the precise mechanics, or the extent to which the BBC’s incompetence and cowardice have assisted those who would undermine it. We do not know, for instance, why the BBC is so hapless as to allow the Trump story to fester for days without putting out a response, or why it has decided that it should take a modest news story and amplify it by losing its own director general.

But we can say this: there is a set of individuals here, with an explicit political mission, who sit behind a specific set of events. Johnson puts Gibb in place, in the same way he and his ministers placed culture warrior right-wingers across the institutional landscape. Gibb has worked to undermine the BBC from within while promoting GB News as the alternative to politically impartial public broadcasting. The latest story, which has now decapitated the organisation, is the result of a Gibb colleague, assisted by the same Johnson-led patchwork of figures who placed him in the BBC in the first place. It’s not conspiratorial to say this. It is simply to describe the alliances and agendas which we know to exist.

Why do they hate the BBC? It’s not for the reason they give. In fact it is the opposite. They do not hate its bias. They want it to adopt their bias.

They attack the BBC precisely because it is intended to be unpolarised. The entire notion of objective, impartial public-service broadcasting is anathema to them. It means there is a core area of public life which they struggle to dominate. It means there is a clean, central oasis at the centre of the British information eco-system that they cannot entirely control, as they do everything else. This is why the BBC is the most trusted news source. It is why they wish to destroy it.

In fact, the BBC has been terrible recently at living up to its reputation. It regularly accepts right-wing narrative frames and fails to provide the viewer with a sense of the objective reality behind competing claims. It’s leadership has proved utterly supine and journalistically ignorant in the face of attack. This latest assault is an attempt to wipe away any remaining courage.

It comes as the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, prepares to initiate the renewal of the Royal Charter in 2028. This has now become an existential moment. It will define whether the BBC will survive. Nandy can submit to the right-wing attack or she can work to strengthen it.

As things stand, the BBC chair is effectively selected by the prime minister - this is basically how Johnson’s creature, Richard Sharp, got the job, or Margaret Thatcher’s choice, the marvellously-named Marmaduke Hussey, got his. Incidentally, Marmaduke Hussey is what I demand people call me when I’m out for the evening in Soho, but that’s irrelevant to our point here.

Half of the BBC Board’s non-executive directors are also chosen by the government. This is how Gibb was parachuted into his position, to initiate acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. Most importantly, the Treasury effectively sets the budget for the BBC. Ostensibly this is in negotiation with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. But if the chancellor wanted to throttle the BBC tomorrow, she could do so. Finally, charter renewal means the BBC operates on the basis of a ten-year extinction clause, which any government could end as soon as it liked.

This is not true independence. Politicians cannot be trusted with the BBC. Even perfectly sensible figures, like Nandy or Keir Starmer, find themselves going a bit mad, pontificating in real time on the broadcasting of a Glastonbury line-up. Less sensible politicians, like Johnson, go further and try to destroy it. Instead they should be formally constrained from interference. The levers should be removed. This would produce better, braver BBC coverage.

There are various ways to do that - you’d probably want to give the board control of appointments and budgets, under Ofcom oversight, with an independent transparent arrangement for budgetary decisions. You would strip the prime minister of any role in appointing the board too. The charter should be permanent, not subject to a ten-year renewal. The culture committee of MPs should provide democratic oversight on a more entrenched and granular basis.

If the populist right was genuine it would happily embrace this type of reform. But in all likelihood it would detest it, because it would prevent it from interfering in media freedom in precisely the way it has done here.

So call their bluff. Introduce long-term systematic reform. Prevent the chipping away of the BBC’s reputation and moral authority.

Obviously this requires a government which is capable of a clear moral and political vision - a quality this administration does not seem capable of. But we can at least hope. And more than that, we can demand it.

These constant right-wing attacks are weakening the BBC to the point of extinction. Urgent wide-ranging action is required to strengthen it before it’s too late. This crisis can be turned into an opportunity.