The BBC's impartiality problems are just beginning

Let's accept that someone at the BBC made a clumsy error in editing some clips of Donald Trump addressing the crowd on 6 January 2021.

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

And let's acknowledge that the BBC has known for some time that there have been problems with aspects of its Arabic service.

Worst-kept secret in the world: all media organisations occasionally screw up.

That's true of all of Fleet Street, as well as leading broadcasters. A newspaper, as the wise old Washington sage David Broder once wrote, is “a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours - distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour”.

The veteran Pulitzer Prizewinning columnist was writing about print journalism, but the same is true of every digital outlet and television company. The important thing, as Broder went on to add, is that we label the product accurately - and correct and update any errors.

The Telegraph - which has revealed the BBC's latest problems - is no more immune to making mistakes than any other news outlet. The difference is that, when its own editorial, ownership and ethical failings come to light, it doesn't register nine on the Richter scale of public and political outrage. That's reserved for the BBC.

Fair enough, you might say. We all contribute to the BBC's journalism through the licence fee, and it enjoys a somewhat protected status within the UK's media environment. That's true. But the venom spat at the BBC on a near-daily basis by its ideological and commercial enemies is out of all proportion to its occasional lapses.

The latest squall has arisen over a “dossier” apparently compiled by one Michael Prescott, a former journalist who worked for Rupert Murdoch, who had something of a ringside seat at the BBC for three years. He has questioned the editing of a