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Whose BBC? (on the BBC head resignation, and the Trump editing and lawsuit)
The immediate trigger was a dossier of allegations of liberal bias that was leaked to the Daily Telegraph. Most prominent among them was Panorama’s editing of Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 to make it look as if the defeated president was directly calling for violence at the US Capitol. The programme certainly messed with his words but it’s far from clear that it misrepresented the overall impact of Trump’s behaviour on that day.
Dodgy splicing – or ‘Frankenstein editing’, as one BBC staff member described the Panorama case to me – isn’t usually sufficient to bring down the leadership. When the BBC changed the order of events in its coverage of the Battle of Orgreave during the 1984-85 miners’ strike to make it look as if the miners, rather than the police, had instigated the violence, the then assistant director general admitted that its report ‘might not have been wholly impartial’. But no heads rolled and no one’s career suffered. When a 2019 edition of Panorama re-edited interviews to make it look as if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was riddled with antisemites, the programme was nominated for a BAFTA.
This time it seems that the director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, were the victims of a sustained campaign by right-wing newspapers, backed by an assortment of Tory and Reform MPs, to destabilise the corporation. Unusually, these voices have a presence on the BBC board: Robbie Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May and self-declared Thatcherite, also sits on the editorial guidelines and standards committee that is supposed to ensure impartiality. It was his friend Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to that committee, who delivered the ‘dossier’ to the BBC board that sparked the current crisis.
...
For many people, this is one of the more baffling aspects of the whole episode. Why would an insurgent right want to remove a director general who was the former deputy chair of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservatives and a head of news who had done so much to tilt BBC output towards a Reform agenda? Why would they want to undermine a leadership that had presided over Gaza coverage that, according to the Centre for Media Monitoring, systematically amplified Israeli narratives and minimised Palestinian suffering? Why would they want to weaken a director general who refused to transmit a documentary on the targeting by Israeli forces of medical staff in Gaza – subsequently shown by Channel 4 – whose removal from the BBC caused significant disquiet, including among BBC staff?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/november/whose-bbc
Dodgy splicing – or ‘Frankenstein editing’, as one BBC staff member described the Panorama case to me – isn’t usually sufficient to bring down the leadership. When the BBC changed the order of events in its coverage of the Battle of Orgreave during the 1984-85 miners’ strike to make it look as if the miners, rather than the police, had instigated the violence, the then assistant director general admitted that its report ‘might not have been wholly impartial’. But no heads rolled and no one’s career suffered. When a 2019 edition of Panorama re-edited interviews to make it look as if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was riddled with antisemites, the programme was nominated for a BAFTA.
This time it seems that the director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, were the victims of a sustained campaign by right-wing newspapers, backed by an assortment of Tory and Reform MPs, to destabilise the corporation. Unusually, these voices have a presence on the BBC board: Robbie Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May and self-declared Thatcherite, also sits on the editorial guidelines and standards committee that is supposed to ensure impartiality. It was his friend Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to that committee, who delivered the ‘dossier’ to the BBC board that sparked the current crisis.
...
For many people, this is one of the more baffling aspects of the whole episode. Why would an insurgent right want to remove a director general who was the former deputy chair of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservatives and a head of news who had done so much to tilt BBC output towards a Reform agenda? Why would they want to undermine a leadership that had presided over Gaza coverage that, according to the Centre for Media Monitoring, systematically amplified Israeli narratives and minimised Palestinian suffering? Why would they want to weaken a director general who refused to transmit a documentary on the targeting by Israeli forces of medical staff in Gaza – subsequently shown by Channel 4 – whose removal from the BBC caused significant disquiet, including among BBC staff?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/november/whose-bbc
It seems worth reading a left wing take on this situation.