But if you can’t stand the BBC, or want to see it significantly weakened, then you don’t have to waste time thinking carefully about these issues. The day after Telegraph released the Prescott memo, Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, now a columnist for Daily Mailsaid it would not pay its license fee – the annual tax of £174.50 per household that funds the BBC – until the broadcaster clearly reveals how it “falsified” Trump’s speech, or its director general, Tim Davie, has resigned. The same day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the channel “100 percent fake news” and a “left-wing propaganda machine.”
Over the weekend, Auntie – as the BBC was once known, for her prudish, colloquial and slightly condescending ways – imploded. BBC News director general Deborah Turness and Davie, its chief executive, announced they would resign. Trump celebrated the news on Truth Social. “These are very dishonest people who tried to get on the scales of a presidential election,” he wrote. “On top of everything else, they come from a foreign country, which many consider our number one ally. What a terrible thing for democracy!” On Monday, he threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion.
The BBC has crises in its composition. It has a deep and complex relationship with both the state and the people 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 each week.) Three of the last five directors-general have resigned after one controversy or another. But, at least in this century, crises have tended to result either from blatant editorial error or from conflict with outside forces, as in 2004, when the BBC clashed with the government over the case for the Iraq war. What is unusual about the current crisis is that it was triggered, at least in part, from within. According to information published in the Tutor and the ObserverPrescott 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 members appointed to the broadcaster’s board. Before joining the BBC, under the Johnson government, in 2021, he helped create GB News, a right-wing cable news channel. For years he has made it his mission to undo the BBC’s perceived liberal bias, contesting appointments and questioning its media coverage. “Gibb’s supporters say he is trying to save the BBC from itself”, Observer reported. “He was also heard last year saying that if he didn’t get what he wanted 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 company’s first century. Hendy, who focuses on the BBC, likes to compare the organization to a Saturn V rocket. It has “a million moving parts, about one percent of which will fail,” he told me. “And that 1% actually means quite a bit of failure.” Like others, Hendy recognized that the systems the BBC has designed to hold itself accountable – its boards and committees, its standards and guidelines – make it more vulnerable and burdensome when it comes under determined attack.
He is also much weaker than before. The BBC suffered a thirty percent cut, in real terms, to its budget between 2010 and 2024, under the Conservative government, and is frequently undermined by politicians of all stripes. On Sunday, while the channel was attacked by both the White House and the right-wing press in the United Kingdom, Lisa Nandy, the Labor minister who currently oversees the funding of the BBC, was hardly reassuring. Nandy said the editing of Trump’s speech was “very serious” and she raised her own concerns about the BBC operating in an environment “where information and facts are often clouded by controversy and opinion, and I think that creates a very, very dangerous environment in this country where people can’t trust what they see.”
In such a climate, Hendy said, it was no surprise that the BBC had become too defensive. “He’s afraid to admit his mistakes,” he told me. “It’s one of those organizations that’s damned if they admit it and damned if they don’t.” But Hendy also drew a distinction between good faith criticism of the national broadcaster and bad faith criticism. He said of Prescott’s leaked letter: “It seems to me that it is not about making the BBC good or honest by pointing out some of these errors or failures. It is as if it is a criticism intended to undermine the BBC as a whole.”
