The BBC needs saving from itself

Britain’s public broadcaster may be biased but there remains strong arguments for keeping it.

- Adrian Wooldridge

One of the oddities of BBC News is that it spends so much time talking about itself — like a snake ingesting its own tail. This time the self-ingestion is justified. On Nov 9, the British Broadcasting Company’s director general, Mr Tim Davie, and head of news, Ms Deborah Turness, resigned in a scandal that goes to the heart of its claim to public money: objectivity.

The most serious charge is that it spliced together two distinct parts of a speech by Mr Donald Trump in 2021 to give the impression that he'd told supporters to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell”.

But there are others: That BBC Arabic consistently took the Palestinian side in the Gaza war; that the BBC was too accommodating of trans activists, talking about “pregnant people” rather than women; and, more generally, that BBC News is overwhelmingly slanted towards the opinions of London’s metropolitan elite.

The reaction to this scandal could determine the future of the century-old public broadcaster, which has to renew its royal charter by the end of 2027.

There are undoubtedly people on the right (many of them employed by rival media organisations) who'd love to drive the BBC out of existence. And there’s an opposing faction in the BBC determined to dismiss the current brouhaha as a “conspiracy” and “coup”. Both groups are wrong.

The scandal is worrying precisely because the institution is so vital to the preservation of liberal democracy. It must be treated as an opportunity for renewal rather than destruction or retrenchment.

The case for a publicly funded but independent national broadcaster rests on the fact that a liberal democracy cannot survive without well-informed citizens. The BBC’s funding model gives it the resources to operate as a gold standard for news gathering, while institutional independence ensures that it avoids party political pressures.