The Director General is Going. Who Will Now Run the BBC?
Tom Mills asks how the BBC can demonstrate its independence and impartiality in a political environment where trust and consensus has collapsed
Once again, the BBC is in crisis. The Director General, Tim Davie, has resigned, as has head of news Deborah Turness. The occasion for these dramatic departures was a misleading edit of a speech by US President Donald Trump in the Panorama documentary ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’ first shown in October 2024. The resignations came after considerable political pressure from the right-wing press, the Conservatives, and, eventually, the American President himself.
At the centre of the controversy was a note written by a former independent member of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, corporate communications executive Michael Prescott, who was the former Political Editor at Murdoch’s Sunday Times. The document, leaked to, and later published by, the Telegraph, included a section on the Panorama programme.
But it also included a range of complaints about the BBC’s reporting and its handling of editorial controversies, including allegations of bias on Israel-Palestine – largely focused on BBC Arabic, rather than its English language reporting – as well as stories on racism and trans issues.
The BBC leadership remained largely silent as the public pressure mounted, with Secretary of State, Lisa Nandy, saying that it must provide answers to these ‘very serious allegations’.
Now, with the high-profile fallout dominating headlines, the BBC’s own programmes are filled with its hard right critics and its conservative and liberal defenders. There are widespread reports of a split on the BBC’s board, and even a boardroom ‘coup’ that forced the departure of Davie and Turness.
Some of these claims have been diplomatically vague, but the more candid have pointed the finger at politically appointed members of the BBC board who have long been at loggerheads with management, and now appear to have won out.
In some ways this is a familiar story. The BBC has, since its earliest days, proudly proclaimed its independence, yet its system of accountability on editorial issues has always run through government, and debates around impartiality have been dominated by political and media insiders – often the BBC’s political enemies on the right.
At points of high political tension, this has, in the past, led to the departure of senior figures. The most famous cases being the resignation of Alasdair Milne under pressure from the Thatcher Government and its political appointees on the Board of Governors, and Greg Dyke, under pressure from the Blair Government in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Recently, the BBC’s defenders have pointed in particular to the role of Robbie Gibb, formerly Theresa May’s director of communications, on the BBC board. Gibb was described by former BBC presenter Emily Maitlis as having operated as an ‘active Tory party agent’, and there have been allegations of him intervening around editorial appointments and reporting. Significantly for the current controversy, the Guardian reports that Gibb was instrumental in the appointment of Michael Prescott to the editorial guidelines and standards committee, and that the two are friends.
The contradiction between the BBC’s governance on the one hand, and lofty claims so often made by its leadership about impartiality and independence on the other, have in recent years been heightened by an increasingly fractured media landscape, and an unstable political environment.
Whilst the BBC can still point to some relatively strong survey data on trust, as well as figures on audience reach, it nevertheless faces a serious long-term crisis of legitimacy. Digital technology has radically transformed how we experience the world and make sense of our place in it, and trust in political institutions – institutions with which despite all the high-profile tensions, the BBC remains profoundly intertwined – has fallen dramatically.
What is called ‘due impartiality’ is a core principle of BBC journalism. But impartiality is an ambiguous concept that in practice can probably only hold sway when a broad elite consensus commands the assent of a large enough proportion of the BBC’s audience. Yet today that consensus once shared by politicians and political institutions has largely collapsed, and so has public trust in them.
The main response to these trends has been for the BBC to promote itself as a bulwark of accuracy and journalistic integrity against the flood of pernicious populism. But the constituency to which this claim appeals is fast shrinking. It’s not that people don’t want the BBC to report impartially. It’s rather that audiences are losing faith in the BBC’s ability to do so, some for well-founded, and some for less well-founded, reasons.
Defenders of the BBC can with some justification point to a serious erosion in the BBC’s income from the disastrous period of austerity. But more funding, however much it is needed, will obviously not reverse the aforementioned social trends, nor will it repair the damage that has been done to the BBC.
As anyone who has worked in an organisation under such conditions knows, the impact is not just on the available resources, but on institutional memory, expertise, efficiency, and the morale and day-to-day autonomy of staff, all of which are also negatively impacted by commercialisation, which at the BBC has continued apace. Managers in this context look to assert their authority to control budgets, but too often lose sight of the core functions and purposes of an organisation, even if this is still invoked in corporate slogans and platitudes.
This is why portraying the current crisis at the BBC simply as a palace coup, as so many commentators are, is a misreading. On one level it would appear to be just that. But if so, what then was at stake politically or editorially between the coup’s victims and victors?
In her departing statement, Deborah Turness wrote of the BBC’s ‘collective vision’ to ‘pursue the truth’. Few would disagree with this. Yet the BBC leadership has been incapable of addressing the key question this then poses: Who should shape how the BBC goes about this vital democratic function?
The current Government, which seems as rudderless as the BBC itself, shares some of the blame. Lisa Nandy was at one stage an advocate of reforming the BBC so it would become a mutualised organisation directly accountable to its audiences. Yet with the renewal of the BBC’s Royal Charter looming, she has remained all but silent on its future.
What we are seeing is an increasingly assertive right-wing assault on public institutions, and a liberal establishment that seems incapable of articulating a meaningful vision in response; falling back on 20th Century patrician ideals that increasingly ring hollow. Up until now, the question of how the BBC is managed and how it fulfils its public purposes has been left to insiders to decide, and sometimes to argue bitterly over. This is simply not sustainable.
With billionaires in Silicon Valley controlling more and more of our media, and exerting ever greater influence over our political systems, the question of what role public media should play in our future is one that the public itself should be debating, and ultimately deciding, as the BBC goes into its 100th year.
Dr Tom Mills is Chair of The Media Reform Coalition. He is a lecturer in sociology at Aston University and the author of The BBC: Myth of a Public Service