The Blogs: The BBC storm: It’s not just a few reporting mistakes

The departure from the BBC of the director-general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, is a trick to deflect critics from dealing with the true rot at the core of the institution. It has been tried before and worked.

The BBC has faced thorough independent investigation only twice: first in 2003, through the Hutton Inquiry commissioned by Prime Minister Tony Blair; and again in 2021, through the Dyson Report commissioned on behalf of the BBC into its 1995 interview with Princess Diana. Both inquiries were led by senior judges and concluded that the BBC’s internal oversight bodies failed in their duty. Rather than acting as independent watchdogs, they shielded the corporation—concealing facts, misleading investigators, and obstructing accountability.

It seemingly takes the involvement of the royals or the Prime Minister to compel a proper investigation. And now, an internal whistleblower has shown what previously only the most powerful forces in the land could uncover, namely that the BBC is failing, beyond a reasonable doubt, to meet its public obligations.

Then, as now, the BBC finds some senior heads to roll, thus distracting the public’s attention from the underlying problem. Indeed, the departures of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness are worded as a noble falling on the sword because they must take responsibility for mistakes. This itself obscured the depth of BBC depravity in two ways.

First, the editing of President Trump’s speech was clearly no mistake. The editor carefully selected phrases separated by 54 minutes to amplify a story that Trump urged supporters to attack Congress, a story which the editor must have known to be false. This is the BBC making up the news in their own image. Davie, apparently made aware of the dishonesty, chose to cover it up. The question remains whether he discussed it with Turness in her capacity as CEO of BBC News, and she also knew and covered it up.

Nothing was done at the time to investigate and dismiss all those journalists who were implicated in broadcasting such a dangerous falsehood. Nor is it said now that they will face the music.

Neither letter of resignation made any direct mention of the second scandal which emerged simultaneously, again from a whistleblower, namely the deep bias running throughout BBC Arabic service. Both Davie and Turness disgracefully insist that the BBC is complying with its obligations and that the widespread allegations of bias are wrong.

All the evidence points the other way. My own report, published last year, demonstrated through painstaking traditional forensic methods coupled with cutting-edge AI methods devised by Dr. Haran Shani-Narkiss, that BBC Arabic was hopelessly partial. On an international scale, its sympathies were closely aligned with Al Jazeera. It broke, and continues to break BBC guidelines with almost every word it utters.

The BBC has no internal methodology for tracking its own bias; it has a deeply ingrained institutional bias regarding many topics along predictable progressive lines which it has failed to address for decades. Ofcom, the internal regulator tasked with handling complaints, operates as a BBC exculpation department; it is stuffed with BBC retirees and has failed to effect change, and the legal system of judicial review makes it almost impossible for a legal challenge to be decisively successful.

Thus, the BBC remains an unchallengeable and failing monster in our midst, spreading the news it wants us to hear, making it up if it needs to, suppressing the stories it does not like, and doing all this under the magic cloak of its charter, which protects it from the reforms it so badly needs.