The BBC’s bias scandal holds lessons for public service media everywhere

The cherished British institution’s failings reveal what happens when newsrooms become echo chambers.

- Bhavan Jaipragas Deputy Opinion Editor

It is tempting to see the fiasco engulfing the BBC over sweeping accusations of left-wing bias — which has United States President Donald Trump threatening libel — as just another episode in the Maga movement’s running war with mainstream media.

Yet this is not only about Mr Trump. From here in Asia, it reads as a saga about practices inside establishment newsrooms that increasingly face accusations of bias and untrustworthiness.

The BBC is only one institution, but because it has long been treated as the gold standard of state-funded public service media, its failings are emblematic of the pressures and blind spots built into that model.

Media critics periodically tell organisations like the publisher of this newspaper that they ought to be more like the British broadcaster - the supposed paragon of impartiality in dealing with culture wars and covering national politics.

This crisis, the BBC’s biggest in decades, should give pause to that hectoring. It should also temper those who hold up major Western media outlets as lodestars for the rest of the world’s news organisations. There is much to admire and learn from them, but they cannot be uncritically accepted as models.

Consider the failings that the BBC’s former standards adviser Michael Prescott documented in his leaked internal report — the catalyst for this spiralling saga.

The most serious charge involves Mr Trump. A Panorama programme that aired in 2024 spliced two snippets of his Jan 6, 2021 speech delivered nearly an hour apart, creating the impression that he had urged supporters to storm the Capitol and “fight like hell”, while omitting lines where he called for peaceful protest. As these words were being written, the BBC said it was investigating a similar case of video-splicing from a June 2022 Newsnight programme.