The Mess at the BBC Will Never End

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 £174.5src 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, 1srcsrc 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 2srcsrc4, 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 2src21, 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 2src1src and 2src24, 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.”