Right-wing critics charging the broadcaster with being “institutionally biased” is nothing new. But when the accusation concerns the current President of the United States, all bets are off.
Two BBC executives have already resigned, and more shake-ups may follow.
The story began with the leak of Michael Prescott’s 19-page dossier to the BBC board. This report detailed complaints about the organisation’s coverage of the Gaza war, LGBTQi rights and US politics. But it’s the editing of Trump’s speech to MAGA supporters on 6 January 2021, prior to the storming of the Capitol, that has received the most attention.
Trump claims the BBC “lied” about the speech. The edited cut run by Panorama emphasised Trump’s call on supporters to “fight like hell”, implying that he was urging them to take dramatic action that day.
The White House has damned the BBC as “fake news”, a concept popularised by Trump’s most vehement critics. But there is a problem here: one man’s fake news is another man’s real news.
Mainstream liberals were quick to invoke the concept of “fake news” against Trumpite media like Breitbart and Fox News. They didn’t bet on Trump using the same weapon against CNN, and now the BBC.
It’s shocking that not only the BBC’s Head of News, Deborah Turness, but also its Director-General, Tim Davie, have resigned over the report. Many ex-BBC insiders, including Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall at the News Agents podcast, are describing these events as a “right-wing coup”.
Right-wingers naturally dispute this claim. Ex-BBC presenter Andrew Neil, who helped set up GB News, has reinforced this position, arguing a right-wing coup couldn’t succeed with Labour in power.
But two things can be true at once.
Although the BBC edit of Trump’s fiery speech was a grave error, that doesn’t preclude the possibility that the current scandal has been engineered for political reasons.
Behind the Leak
The so-called Prescott memo was handed over to The Telegraph, a daily that has gone from cheering for Boris Johnson and Liz Truss to cheering for Nigel Farage. It was a major scoop for the paper, which has mocked the notion that it’s involved in a “right-wing coup”.
Whenever a leak of this magnitude happens, it’s worth asking what’s behind it. Few leaks occur by accident or for no reason. Many are carefully coordinated by those with the pertinent information. It’s worth asking if this is the case with the Prescott memo.
The Telegraph is much less important in this scandal than the leakers.
Some people might find it interesting that Michael Prescott is managing director of Hanover Communications, a public relations firm with longstanding ties to the Conservative Party.
Among its clients, Hanover Communications has represented US tech giants who have donated to the Republican Party. These include Oracle, owned by Larry Ellison, the world’s second richest man, a Republican megadonor, and a staunch Trump ally.
But Prescott is no lightweight in SW1 media. He was previously the political correspondent at The Sunday Times, one of Rupert Murdoch’s most prized publications. This role would’ve given him unique access to the Westminster class.
The other central figures in this saga are BBC board member Robbie Gibb and senior adviser David Grossman, a former Newsnight journalist. Prescott’s so-called “memo” echoed internal criticism raised by Grossman in reports yet to be seen.
Gibb is the fascinating figure, though. A lifelong Tory, Gibb served as Theresa May’s press director from 2017 to 2019. He was appointed non-executive director to the BBC board by Boris Johnson in 2021. His brother Nick was the Conservative MP for Bognor Regis until 2024.
Outside Whitehall, Gibb was the public face of a mysterious consortium that snapped up The Jewish Chronicle in 2020, acting on behalf of unknown fianciers. Gibb was also an adviser to GB News ahead of its 2021 launch.
Naturally, the Prescott memo selected culture war topics, particularly the UK news coverage of trans rights and BBC Arabic‘s reporting on Gaza. If Trump is the headline, the meat of the story is about the politics of biological sex and the bombing of civilians.
The kernel of truth in conservative criticism is that the BBC tends to run liberal coverage of cultural and social issues. It’s undeniable that the BBC is dominated by a kind of Oxbridge centrist liberalism.
As for Gaza, BBC Arabic is in the crosshairs for running less sympathetic coverage of the Israeli government and not stressing the plight of Israeli casualties. This contrasts with the English mainline of BBC coverage, where Israeli lives are prized more than Palestinian lives.
However, BBC coverage is often contorted by the pressures the organisation faces from within and without. So the BBC doesn’t describe Hamas members as “terrorists”, but it does describe the Gaza Health Ministry as “Hamas-controlled.”
The founding contradiction of the BBC is that its independence and impartiality are constrained by its institutional structure. Political appointments to its board, including its director-general, oversee operations. The government of the day always picks board members with impeccable establishment credentials.
Typically, the BBC favours the traditional parties of government as representatives of the official left and right in the country. This set-up is finally breaking down as Labour is facing obliteration at the ballot box and the Tories grow more irrelevant every day.
The BBC serves as the agenda-setter in the national media, with newspapers vying for the terms of debate. These papers are part of a feedback loop with the BBC, in which the approved versions of right-wing and left-wing views are platformed.
So when right-wingers say the BBC is left-wing, they’re really advancing a claim about the national discourse. From their perspective, the BBC should platform more conservatives and fewer liberals, and certainly no socialists, on issues like immigration.
It’s possible the ouster of Davie and Turness will make the BBC even more fearful of clashing with right-wing newspapers. Cynics might say this is the purpose of the leaks rather than any genuine concerns about “impartiality”.
Another problem with how this scandal has played out is the conflation of impartiality with objectivity. No news organisation provides unmediated facts without an overarching framework or value judgements. But no respectable news organisation runs complete fiction as the truth.
Impartiality is a necessary ideological framework for BBC coverage. The reality is quite different, with the BBC serving as a public mediator in the market for news and entertainment. Yet we’re meant to believe right-wing newspapers have no reason to undermine this mediator.
We’re meant to believe the report was drafted and leaked for no reason other than serving the public interest. But if this were true, certain right-wingers wouldn’t be crowing from rooftops.
Nigel Farage can barely contain his glee that the BBC is in crisis. He should be more grateful to BBC One’s Question Time for hosting him dozens of times over many years. The broadcaster helped build him into the populist powerhouse he is today.
The public apology has only emboldened Trump, who, perhaps sensing weakness, upped his demand for compensation after the BBC statement was issued.
Make no mistake, the BBC resignations are a victory for the right inside and outside the organisation.
Institutional Bias
Defenders of the BBC love pointing out that the left attacks the broadcaster just as the right does. They often claim the BBC must be “doing its job” if it’s being taken to task by extremists of all stripes.
This claim is valid to the extent that the BBC has its own worldview and constituency. The broadcaster always spoke for a cross-section of the public, but never the whole country. This cross-section has changed over time.
No longer is the BBC constituency small ‘c’ conservative as it was in the days of John Reith. The BBC speaks for a kind of social liberalism defined by the narrow scope of the status quo and by fiscally conservative economics, embraced by Labour and the Tories.
What we’ve seen in recent decades is that the BBC tends to go along with austerity and humanitarian interventionism. The BBC framed all coverage of public spending from 2010 through 2015 as if the choice was how much to cut.
Left-wing critics will remember that the BBC only acknowledged the damage of austerity once it was too late and when the establishment was retreating on this front. This bubble was rarely pierced until Brexit.
Similarly, Newsnight ran interviews with liberal hawks and neocons in the run-up to the 2013 vote on bombing Syria. Yes, Mehdi Hasan was allowed on eventually, but only after Bernard Kouchner, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Aaronovitch had all made their case for the bombing.
Of course, we’ve all seen the infamous clip of BBC political editor Andrew Marr talking up the 2003 invasion of Iraq just after the war began. No one would have remembered had the Iraq war turned out as well as the neocons had hoped.
Say what you will about Russia Today (RT) presenters, but some of them did step down in protest at the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not a single BBC presenter resigned over the invasion of Iraq. For his part, Marr has gone on to higher things, such as cheerleading for Keir Starmer, only to regret it.
Many Labour Party members have fond memories of Newsnight running a photo of Jeremy Corbyn superimposed onto the Kremlin skyline (complete with a suspicious hat). It’s often forgotten that Newsnight juxtaposed Corbyn with Osama bin Laden in a 2015 segment.
The same programme jokingly heralded Corbyn’s victory in the 2015 leadership election with a scene from a Harry Potter film. The BBC presented Corbyn as the dreaded Voldemort, with his face replacing the grim visage on the back of Quirinus Quirrell’s head.
So the BBC’s edit of Donald Trump has precedent. It’s just this time the BBC made the mistake of picking on the US president.
A vegetarian socialist Labour leader is fair game, but a raging populist Republican president is most definitely not.
The BBC will likely become even more risk-averse as a result of this scandal. BBC editors and producers will play it safe rather than risk more trouble from right-wing detractors, but they will do so at their own peril.
No one will defend them if they won’t defend themselves.
Photograph courtesy of Steve Bowbrick. Published under a Creative Commons license.
