As a BBC News journalist who has been driven to distraction by the corporation’s repeated displays of apparent bias, I didn’t think I was capable of being shocked anymore. It turns out I was wrong. Reading The Telegraph’s revelations about serious editorial lapses within BBC News was utterly sobering.
As I digested the information contained within a leaked internal memo, a range of now familiar emotions washed over me – dismay, disappointment, anger, sadness – but also a sense of vindication, albeit rather hollow. What originally prompted me to start writing articles in this publication back in 2021, criticising the BBC’s one-sided coverage of the pandemic, was deep frustration that my concerns over impartiality were either ignored or derided when I raised them in-house. The leaked memo, written by former journalist Michael Prescott, proves my experience was merely the tip of an enormous iceberg.
Until as recently as June, Prescott was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. Although he was operating at a much higher seniority level than I ever have, there are parallels between his experience and mine. Like me, he had seen repeated examples of apparent bias in the BBC’s coverage of a range of contentious issues. Like me, he had raised his unease in-house. And like me, he found his concerns downplayed or dismissed. His despair at being rebuffed led him to write to the BBC board last month. His memo, which was soon circulating in government departments, was passed on to the Telegraph by a source who thought licence fee payers had the right to know its contents. Too right they do.
The full dossier is well worth reading, demonstrating skewed coverage of the US election, racial diversity, biological sex and gender, and the Israel-Hamas war. The detailed evidence is utterly damning not simply because it enumerates grave instances of editorial bias, but because it shines a light on the cavalier arrogance and detachment from reality of those at the top of the BBC.
From my perspective, Prescott’s experience proves what I had come to conclude some time ago: the BBC’s editorial leaders are either ideologically captured or morally craven. They have either drunk the progressive Kool-Aid in such quantities that their concept of impartiality has become treacherously distorted, or they know full well that they are churning out slanted coverage, but they are too cowardly to stand up to the DEI hires, woke warriors, and sectarian antisemites on the staff.
A fish rots from the head and, right now, the BBC stinks like a decaying trout on a blazing hot beach. The salaries of Director-General Tim Davie and his key lieutenants – Deborah Turness, Jonathan Munro and Richard Burgess – add up to a cool £1.5 million a year. You may view such generous remuneration as reasonable for those who hold significant responsibilities. But how can anyone possibly justify paying this when they appear to have failed, time and again, to ensure the BBC fulfils its basic mission statement to achieve ‘due impartiality in all its output’?
Perhaps we should take as mitigation the remorse they have shown since the Telegraph published the dossier, the public apologies they have issued for breaching the trust of the nearly 24 million households who still pay the licence fee, and the joint pledge they made to work tirelessly to fix the BBC’s editorial compass. Only joking. Of course, none of those things have happened. As The Telegraph’s Gordon Rayner stated on X, the BBC’s top tier ‘clearly believe that if they just ignore The Telegraph’s revelations, the whole thing will go away’.
The official radio silence from management has been maintained at Broadcasting House too. Managers love nothing more than a self-congratulatory all-staff email. But when a presenter turns out to be a sex pest or a paedophile, a Gaza documentary is presented by a Hamas-adjacent youngster, or antisemitic death chants are broadcast during a music festival, the enthusiasm for a candid electronic missive is somewhat diminished. Still, one usually arrives in my inbox from on-high eventually. It appears, however, that in the case of the Prescott memo, the BBC has no defence to mount, no context to provide, so its leaders have decided to stay shtum and hope the scandal blows over or is buried by other news.
You might think frontline BBC journalists would down tools in protest and demand senior heads roll. Regrettably, what the dossier also clearly illustrates is that too many BBC hacks are complicit in the corporation’s decline. With increasing diversity in the workplace a key function of BBC recruitment, the new generation of BBC journalists are as woke as a joke. Refusing to leave their politics at the revolving doors of Broadcasting House, they instead filter every event they report through the prism of their progressive prejudices: Israel is a genocidal rogue state; trans women are women; JK Rowling is a dastardly ‘TERF’; Trump is an evil dictator; diversity is strength, etc.
Rather than contrition, BBC bosses continue to give a two-fingered salute to anyone who craves a return to measured, sensible, balanced, rational reporting by the national broadcaster. On the same day the Telegraph published the full damning dossier, the BBC reported it had upheld 20 impartiality complaints against News Channel presenter Martine Croxall. Her crime? Correcting a script live on air that had absurdly referred to ‘pregnant people’. The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit decided Croxall’s facial expression when she added the word ‘women’ gave the ‘strong impression of expressing a personal view’ on a controversial matter.
So, there you have it. It seems fine to peddle Hamas propaganda, platform anti-Semites, doctor footage of the US president, leverage racial grievance for clicks, promote damaging trans ideology to kids – but acknowledging biological realities that have existed since the dawn of humankind? That’s bang out of order.
Unless the government steps in and forces the BBC’s top tier to quit and ride off into the sunset on their Brompton bikes, the corporation is finished. Its reputation is already shot, trust has been on the slide for years, and all the signs are it’s only going to get worse. No one should be forced to pay for a product that is being mis-sold. Perhaps licence fee payers should take out a class action for compensation. I’d sign up.
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