The full story of what has happened at the BBC may take months (or years) to emerge. But it’s become evident that a combination of poor editorial judgement and political meddling by longstanding BBC critics contributed to Tim Davie and Deborah Turness’s departures.
That there were editorial mistakes is not in question. The BBC Panorama documentary on Trump spliced together two different parts of Trump’s notorious January 6 2021 speech on Capitol Hill, without making the edit clear.
The programme itself, which was broadcast a few days before the 2024 US presidential election, was arguably carefully balanced, containing an equal number of Trump supporters and detractors. Notably, it did not receive a single complaint at the time of transmission.
It was broadcast a week before the 2024 US presidential election – nearly four years after the speech itself. It wasn’t a programme that was likely to sway anyone’s views of the president, who was impeached for “incitement of insurrection” after January 6. He was later acquitted.
Nevertheless, it was wrong to edit the speech in this way. That error was one of many allegations of institutional bias included in a dossier by Michael Prescott. Until June, Prescott – a former political editor for Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and longtime PR professional – was an external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.
The report was leaked to the Telegraph, which splashed with selected excerpts alleging that the programme had been “doctored”, and listing other editorial problems that he claimed the BBC had failed to put right.
Political influence
The Telegraph, like much of the British press, has for decades waged an editorial war against the BBC. As a publicly funded, free-to-air broadcaster, which is by some distance the most trusted news provider in the UK, the BBC is a serious challenge to news publishers’ commercial interests. It also offends the political sensibilities of those opposed to public funding interventions more generally.
It was therefore only a matter of time before the Telegraph “exclusive” on BBC bias and the Panorama programme escalated, especially once noticed by the White House. As the crisis gathered steam, one of the many burning questions was: why on earth is the BBC not responding?
It has now been reported – including by the BBC’s media editor Katie Razzall and BBC presenter Nick Robinson – that an apology was drafted by the BBC news team and was ready to be signed off a week ago.
Unfortunately, the BBC board reportedly prevented Turness from putting out the apology, instead opting for a letter to MPs on the media select committee. What followed was a damaging vacuum, with the BBC unable to defend itself or acknowledge its error. As internal arguments raged, it simply issued a bland statement that it would respond in writing to the select committee.
Key to this institutional paralysis and the fallout that followed were the political appointees to the BBC board. When the BBC charter was renewed in 2016, the then Conservative government introduced a new governance structure. The BBC would be governed by a unitary board of 14, including a chair, and four part-time members, each representing one of the UK’s nations. These five were all government appointees.
That boardroom dissent was, it now appears, led by those political appointees, in particular Sir Robbie Gibb. Following time as a BBC executive in charge of political programmes, Gibb was Conservative prime minister Theresa May’s director of communications. He was subsequently involved in the founding of GB News, an avowedly right-wing news channel.
In the words of Prospect magazine and former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Gibb “does not pretend to be impartial on issues related to British politics or Israel”.
Gibb was appointed to the BBC board by Boris Johnson, reappointed by Rishi Sunak, and his term runs until 2028. It is therefore unsurprising that Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has called for Gibb’s immediate removal from the board and for an end to the practice of political appointments.
The Conversation has reached out to Gibb for comment.
In his letter to the chair of the media select committee on Monday, BBC chairman Samir Shah acknowledged the Panorama mistake and apologised for the news team’s “error of judgement”. He made it clear, however, that Prescott’s report “does not present a full picture of the discussions, decisions and actions that were taken”.
Changes for the future
This peculiar arrangement of political appointments appears to have effectively given partisan appointees a veto over a crucial senior management decision, resulting in the forced departure of the BBC’s two most senior news executives.
While Davey is right that this anomaly needs to be rectified, the whole BBC governance structure is in need of an overhaul. At a time of increasing polarisation and social media misinformation, it is more important than ever that the BBC is protected from political interference.
The next BBC charter, starting from January 2028, offers a perfect opportunity to provide the kind of protective structure that the BBC requires. As part of a campaign to support public service broadcasting in the UK, the British Broadcasting Challenge – a group of academics and media professionals that includes myself and The Conversation’s CEO Chris Waiting – published a report last month calling for a “genuinely independent public appointments process for the chair and trustees, insulated from covert and overt government influence”.
This could be done through a dedicated body set up under the same terms as the wholly independent Press Recognition Panel, with no links to any political party or partisan campaigning group. Such a body could be responsible not just for non-executive BBC appointments (including its chair) but also for the chair of regulator Ofcom and the chair of Channel 4 – both currently in the gift of government.
The Labour government is about to kickstart a debate on the next BBC charter. Lisa Nandy, as the responsible secretary of state, has it in her hands to rectify some of the egregious damage inflicted on the BBC’s reputation by the political meddling of the last few days. Let’s hope that she rises to the challenge.
Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications, University of Westminster
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.