The BBC is being mauled again by right-wingers. They’ve got an agenda. The sudden resignations of the BBC’s Director General Tim Davie and News chief exec Deborah Turness provide clear evidence of this.
Let’s start with Nigel Farage, shall we? Because these days nothing in the public interest can be considered without evocation of his name. According to a report by the Guardian, Turness had apparently been trying hard to “broaden out coverage and appeal to Reform voters”. Perhaps that is why he, Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf are repeatedly on Question Time and other political shows.
The Greens, with four MPs to Reform’s five, and the Lib Dems (72 MPs) are routinely sidelined by Question Time. Anti-EU, anti-woke, anti-migrant, and anti-left voices are platformed by the show.
But capitulation only emboldens Farage, ever an opportunist and bully. He now says his mate Donald Trump is angry and upset, and accuses the Beeb of being “institutionally biased for years”.
The latest crisis blew up after a stark internal dossier by a former independent external BBC adviser, Michael Prescott, was leaked to the Telegraph. In it, he had raised concerns over impartiality on trans issues and Gaza, and criticised a Panorama programme, broadcast over a year ago, on the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots.
The programme had spliced together two different parts of speeches made by Trump. Bad practice, but it’s clear to me that his views were not misrepresented. He is threatening to sue the BBC. Interestingly, the same company which made the programme is currently making a documentary on Farage. Just saying.
The former Sun editor David Yelland claimed on the Today programme that “insiders, very close to the board [and]… on the board… have systematically undermined Tim Davie and his senior team over a period of time”.
Many BBC watchers and insiders point the finger at board member Robbie Gibb, who was appointed to the board by Boris Johnson in 2021, shortly after describing the corporation as having been “culturally captured by…woke-dominated groupthink”. Gibb was reportedly a “driving force” behind Prescott getting the advisory role – he and Prescott are friends. (“Friends of Gibb” have told the press that he has consistently supported Tim Davie and wanted him to stay.)
Gibb was a director of Jewish Chronicle Media Ltd until last year. The Jewish Chronicle unconditionally supports Israel. Danny Cohen, a former BBC Director and “proud” Zionist, writes fiery columns slamming the BBC in the Telegraph. This July, over 400 media figures, including 111 BBC staffers, signed a letter demanding the BBC remove Gibb from the board due to “concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine”.
The recent accusations of pro-Gaza reporting are patently biased, in my view. And the charges of unfairness towards Trump, an industrial peddler of untruths, are fatuous.
Many of the BBC’s detractors want narratives to promote nativist, nationalist and Conservative views. Alternatives are sedition, and even the pliant BBC is considered a danger to their sinister project.
Five years ago, the journalist Adam Bienkov of Byline Times was told by one of Boris Johnson’s special advisors that Johnson really, really wanted to “kill off” the BBC. It’s what others in today’s morally bankrupt Tory party and Reform want too. See how they relish the humiliation of an institution which still, as Jonathan Dimbleby says, provides a unique and often vital public service to us and the world. I say that in spite of many misgivings about coverage and political subjectivity.
Senior BBC management should have recaptured the moral high ground long ago. They chose to appease the enemy which hates them viscerally. And to take their loyal backers for granted. Cowardice and expediency were the pathetic strategy.
Cowardice and expediency are the pathetic strategies adopted by Keir Starmer’s government too. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is the bridge between the two. She should have come out blazing against the well-organised battalion smearing the BBC.
But instead, she timidly mutters that charges of bias are being taken seriously. Labour has been genuflecting to Tory and Reform voters since the election – which it won with a huge majority. And, like the BBC, it seems they have decided that their metropolitan, progressive, diverse, liberal electorates don’t count any more.
Neither Auntie nor this government seem able to understand that right-wing political schemers in the UK and US are seeking to obliterate the left and centre-right and liberal democracy itself. Do you want this nation to become like Trump’s America? Or Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
My message to them both: stop grovelling to your enemies. Wake up and defend yourselves, or die.
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