John Ware has always been one of my favourite BBC reporters. He is a beacon of decency: thoughtful, impartial, reliable. So, I am sorry to disagree with his piece for TheArticle yesterday, and with so many other distinguished broadcasters and BBC executives, past and present.
The reason is simple. The reason so many have lost trust in BBC News was not because of a single edit, foolish though it was, in a Panorama programme. It is because for some years now the BBC has been guilty, again and again, of systemic bias on a wide range of issues. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Too often, the BBC can no longer be trusted. It’s not the organisation it was when John first started working for it in 1986, a few years before I did.
The problem the BBC has with impartiality did not start this year. On January 17, 2022 Alastair Stewart, himself a distinguished newsreader for many years, quoted a new poll. It asked nearly 8000 people, “What do you think is the BBC’s key problem?” The answer by a mile, according to 67% of respondents, was “Impartiality”. Way behind came “The licence fee” (21.3%), “Staffing levels” (6.5%) and “It tries to do too much” (5.3%).
Crucially, this came a few years after the Brexit referendum, which was the beginning of the new political and cultural conflicts which have divided contemporary Britain and introduced a new kind of populism to our politics. But that was just the beginning, not just of the new populist politics, but of the BBC’s reaction to the new cultural and political divides. What has happened over the past few days is part of that reaction. It is not just about a single episode of Panorama; it’s not even just about News and Current Affairs at the BBC, though that is by far the worst and most damning offender.
For example, look at what’s happened to Doctor Who since Russell T. Davies returned to run the show in 2021. This was nothing to do with the first woman Doctor or the first Black Doctor. It was because Russell T. Davies went woke, with trans characters and an Asian actor playing Isaac Newton. According to an article in June, “Researchers have found that 42 per cent of Doctor Who fans say the show has got worse since 2005, when the BBC brought it back after 16 years away. And almost half of current continuing viewers, 46 per cent, say they believe the series now puts social justice and so-called ‘woke’ issues above quality, according to a poll.”
James Johnson from JL Pollsters said, “The public believe a once-great show has lost its way - and their biggest complaint is that it puts pursuit of wokeness above entertainment value. The main words associated with it are rubbish, boring, and woke. If the BBC want to grow the show’s audience once more, they will need a total revamp - and to get back to telling entertaining stories rather than preaching lessons that simply do not have an audience among the British public.”
In response, Davies told Radio 2, “there are online warriors accusing us of diversity and wokeness and involving messages and issues. And I have no time for this. I don’t have a second to bear [it]. Because what you might call diversity, I just call an open door.” This is the heart of the matter. What critics of the BBC call “wokeness”, programme-makers “just call an open door.”
It’s not just what used to be the BBC’s most popular children’s programme. News gets exactly the same criticisms. Within days of October 7th John Simpson and Mishal Husain announced that they would not be calling Hamas “a terrorist organisation”. “Terrorism,” wrote Simpson on the BBC News website, “is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn - who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
Mishal Husain had a fiery exchange with a government minister, Grant Shapps, over the same issue on the Today programme. She left the BBC two years later. Neither she nor the BBC explained whether this had anything to do with her take on Hamas. According to Shapps, “The BBC seems to refuse to call them terrorists even though the British Parliament has legislated that they are terrorists.”
All of this was long before that episode of Panorama. More important, it established the divide between the BBC and many licence fee-payers. It wasn’t about Trump, though it was clearly folly to pick a fight with America’s President. It was about woke, whether trans gender characters in a children’s programme or someone writing on the autocue about “pregnant people” because they thought it was offensive to write “pregnant women”. When the newsreader Martine Croxall ignored it and said “pregnant women” anyway, she came under attack within the BBC.
It was also, crucially, about the BBC’s shockingly biased coverage of Israel, endlessly interviewing NGOs from international charities who spoke of “famine” and “genocide”, quoting “the Gaza Health Ministry” as if such an organisation could possibly be independent in Gaza run by Hamas. I have documented inaccuracies and examples of bias in the BBC’s coverage of Gaza on numerous occasions for TheArticle, so I won’t repeat what I said then.
The key point is that though supporters of the BBC speak of “mistakes”, these cases of falsification are not random errors. There are too many of them and they take too many forms. Pro-Israel speakers are interrupted in the way that UN representatives and NGOs never are. Studio discussions are set up so that pro-Israel speakers are outnumbered and not allowed the same amount of time as pro-Hamas speakers. Too often we are only told about suffering Palestinian Arabs, not about Hamas. Words like “Genocide” and “Famine” are thrown around without proper statistical analysis. False photos and videos are used without critical scrutiny.
For months, the mass murder of Christians in Nigeria and Sudan was marginalised and Gaza took precedence, even though according to Open Doors, “More than 16.2 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, including high numbers from Nigeria, have been driven from their homes by violence and conflict. Millions now live in displacement camps.” Palestinian Arabs are the right kinds of victims. African Christians are not. Why is that? Have you ever heard a BBC News executive or reporter explain this policy?
This is a political and cultural issue. BBC News was against Brexit, against Johnson, against Farage and Reform, for Labour, for judges and human rights lawyers over immigration. On Sunday evening, after the Director-General and the Head of News had both resigned, the BBC News Channel interviewed Alan Rusbridger, longtime editor of The Guardian and now of Prospect.
Samir Shah, the Chairman of the BBC, said, “This is a bad day for the BBC.” Curiously, he didn’t say why. The resignation of Tim Davie, on whose watch there had been scandals about Gregg Wallace and John Torode from Master Chef, the highly paid newsreader, Huw Edwards, the outcry over this summer’s Glastonbury coverage and a documentary about Gaza narrated by the son of a Hamas minister, might be seen as a cause for celebration.
Defenders of the BBC would say licence fee payers are entitled to complain to the BBC if they don’t like a particular programme. Have you ever tried complaining to the BBC? I have tried, on numerous occasions, but you can’t speak to anyone and if you email or leave a phone message no one ever replies. It is the most byzantine organisation. No other major company would treat its customers like this.
And then when people dare criticise BBC News for systemic bias (not for the odd mistake) the Today programme speaks darkly of plots and cabals, and the BBC’s supporters speak of “a concerted effort, both on ideological and commercial grounds”, without any evidence at all. Charles Moore, on Monday’s Today programme, gave detailed examples of BBC bias. David Yelland, on the same programme, spoke of plots to get rid of Tim Davie, without naming any names or giving any evidence at all. At least Nick Robinson did mention that Yelland presents a podcast for The BBC.
When Alan Rusbridger was interviewed on the BBC News Channel, however, the interviewer did not think it was necessary to mention how many copies of The Guardian are bought by the BBC every day which must be handy when its circulation has long been in free fall, down by one half from 204,222 copies in December 2012 to 105,134 in July 2021.
Unfortunately, all of this happens when the Secretary of Culture, Media and Sport is Lisa Nandy, whose interview with Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, suggested she is not on top of her brief. Perhaps she’s too preoccupied with apologising for breaking rules after “failing to declare she had received donations from the man she picked to run England’s new football regulator” (BBC News website)?
The key issue at the heart of all of this is not about Panorama or even presenters of BBC programmes behaving badly. It’s certainly not about the odd mistake. It is about systemic bias, alienating many of its viewers and listeners, being slow to respond to accusations of bias, licence fee payers losing trust in what used to be flagship programmes like Newsnight, Panorama and Question Time, its endless fascination with Trump (live coverage on the News Channel of his press conference with President Orban? Seriously?).
The Today programme and the BBC News Channel wheeled out interviews with former BBC News executives like Mark Damazer and Roger Mosey, who spoke like groupies not former TV executives (“I love the BBC,” said Mosey). They were less keen on interviewing critics of BBC News like Danny Cohen, previously the Director of BBC Television, who wrote in an op-ed that the anti-Israel rot in the BBC reaches all the way to “Director General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, whose consistent modus operandi against all criticism appears to be to deny, defend and deflect.” No interviews with longtime critics of BBC bias like David Elstein or with someone from Ofcom who said the BBC’s documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, “broke broadcasting rules which state that factual programmes must not materially mislead the audience.”
And certainly no interview on the BBC with former BBC journalist Robin Aitken, who pointed out elsewhere that Davie is the third Director-General in a row who has had to resign over scandals in journalism, following George Entwistle and Tony Hall. Aitken told Sky News on Sunday evening that “there’s a large number of people in the country who don’t trust the BBC” and according to that poll in January 2022 haven’t trusted them for quite some time. “The BBC marks its own homework,” Aitken said.
So where are the independent people from outside the BBC who can scrutinise its output? One reason for the bias is a culture at the BBC which lacks diversity of opinion. Where are the pro-Brexit, pro-Johnson, pro-Israel voices in BBC News? Shouldn’t BBC journalists and editors open themselves up to scrutiny by people from outside the BBC?
This is not about cabals and conspirators plotting against the BBC. It is not about a single episode of Panorama. This crisis in BBC News, and it always seems to be news programmes which bring down DGs, is about bias and being out of touch on a whole series of issues from immigration and sexual politics to multi-culturalism and Islamophobia.
Most troubling of all is that those who support the BBC are either from within the BBC, past and present, or are on the Left (examples from the past day or so include Peter Tatchell, Alan Rusbridger, and Bill Rammell, a former Labour minister). Those who criticise the BBC seem to be on the Right (Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch, Charles Moore).
So ask yourself this: How did the BBC become a political football? This cannot be good for the way we think about public service broadcasting in this country. Addressing the charge of systematic bias should be on top of the in-tray of the new Director-General and the new Head of News.
David Herman is a freelance journalist. He has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, Prospect and Standpoint, among others.
Reposted with permission fromTheArticle , which states as its goal to be "a website which helps you make sense of the news through free access to exchanges of ideas, rather than echo chambers of prejudice. We have no ideological agenda and we promise never to tell you what to think. Our aim is simply to preserve the integrity of the free press in this country by embracing nuance and complexity - and showing the world in all its shades of grey. To read /TheArticle is to see a story from every angle with no abuse, no extremism - and proper editing."