Allegations of bias are hard to prove. A breach of editorial rules is not. The BBC crisis came to a head because Panorama’s elision of words by Donald Trump was impossible to ignore. When the BBC’s own television comedy show Have I Got News For You played a section – what Trump seemed to say on Panorama, what he actually said – it wasn’t making a joke to its four million audience. The edit indicated that he had encouraged demonstrators to violence at the United States Capitol.
If the departure of the head of news became inevitable, the director-general going too was a surprise. Some high-profile BBC journalists claimed the corporation had been brought low by political and commercial opponents. The truth was it had handed them a gift.
The issues that have blighted the BBC – and what a list there is – divide into two categories. The first has been black and white: Jimmy Savile and sex abuse, Martin Bashir and a forged document designed to lure the Princess of Wales into an interview, Huw Edwards and paedophilia, Greg Wallace backstage, Gary Lineker’s salary and political announcements. These talk to failures of day-to-day management.
The second category is more nebulous. Is the BBC biased? It is an allegation never satisfactorily resolved, despite the different evidence offered by all sides. The left believes that support for the establishment is in the corporation’s DNA, the right that it is infested by liberal minds out to change the nation’s values. The latter admit this might not be wilful: perhaps the staff are so bien pensant that they don’t even realise they are propagandising.
As the culture war rages, Remainers won’t forgive the BBC for broadcasting Brexit lies, Brexiteers its support of the EU. Evidence that the BBC sided with Hamas in the Gaza war is challenged by data purporting to show a refusal to confront Israel. Liberal anger that the corporation created Reform UK by putting Nigel Farage on air sits at odds with a GB News audience that rejects the “woke BBC”.
The Trump edit cut through such debate, detailing an episode that all could understand. Naturally, it crossed the Atlantic, was picked up by the White House and used to elevate the president to the moral high ground. While the former BBC standards adviser Michael Prescott, who raised the complaint, also provided evidence of bias by BBC News Arabic, that would never have provoked such interest.
But did the Trump edit prove bias? Was it designed to place the president in the worst light? Or simply a mistake? Opponents point to the first. Old BBC hands go for the second, claiming mishaps tend to cock-up rather than conspiracy. The BBC could have avoided the question if it had responded adequately when the issue was first raised.
Imagine if it had simply reviewed the Panorama episode, identified the mis-splicing of Trump’s words, recut the programme and apologised for its mistake. There might have been a squall, but nothing like a storm. It chose instead to deny anything was wrong, claim usual journalistic practice and retreat into bureaucratic defensiveness. Did no one pause to ask: does this look right? Why cold-shoulder a man who knows his way around editorial standards? How stupid can it be?
Of course, we understand that journalists are bad at admitting mistakes. They have long been trained to refuse to say sorry, despite the inherent imperfectability of an industry built on speed. Newspapers lobbing bricks might note that their own managing editors pride themselves on their ability to obfuscate to press watchdogs until complainants retreat in frustration.
Papers, however, are relatively small and instinctively agile. They take no public funding. Deep down, most understand their own imperfections. It’s not clear that the BBC does. We’re encouraged to admire BBC Verify, forced to submit to homilies from the presenter Clive Myrie on the importance of trust, and left puzzled by the corporation’s speed to censure a newsreader for raising an eyebrow at a script reference to “pregnant people”.
Yet we admire too the journalistic principles of so many who work at the BBC and we are unhappy to contemplate an alternative. Research says the public has continued to trust the organisation. While we doubt the latest debacle will change that immediately, it is time to encourage further diversity of views on the editorial floor. A stubborn organisation must think what it looks like from the outside. Now it has yet another clean-up on its hands, a charter renewal in sight and difficult talks with government ahead. It’s time it got its act together.
KF