Arsonists cosplaying as fire fighters: Why the right-wing war on the BBC is succeeding

The resignation of Tim Davie as BBC Director-General is the next stage in the corporation's collapse into cowardice.

IMPARTIALITY OF THE B.B.C.
M.P.s Question Sir John Reith…

— headline in The Times, March 16, 1937

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The BBC’s most vehement right-wing critics are like arsonists pretending they’re writing fire safety pamphlets. Their critiques of the corporation are amplified by a right-wing press with both ideological and commercial reasons for wanting the BBC out of the way. The latest ‘crisis’ at the corporation is the product of a week of stories from The Daily Telegraph that turned a memo to the organisation’s board written by Michael Prescott, a former independent member of the BBC’s editorial standards committee, into a ‘shocking leaked dossier’.

Prescott is a former political editor of The Sunday Times who has spent much of his career as a senior figure in corporate affairs at companies including BT and as a major figure at the giant PR firm Weber Shandwick and, more recently, Hanover Communications. He’s a long-time friend of Robbie Gibb, the former BBC man turned Conservative government comms boss turned GB News adviser turned thorn-in-the-side BBC board member appointed by Boris Johnson. Prescott’s ‘independence’ is questionable at best. Just look at where his memo ended up.

During the Blair government, Alastair Campbell’s comms team had a strategy called MTBL — memo to be leaked — and that’s exactly what Prescott was up to here: his complaints were turned into a ‘secret’ document that could be made sensational in the hands of Daily Telegraph hacks.

The part of the ‘dossier’ that has been most focused upon is a clumsy or shady — depending on your perspective — edit of Donald Trump’s January 6th speech in a Panorama documentary, which spliced together lines that occurred almost an hour apart. If you watch the entire programme — which I have but most people can’t as the BBC has now pulled it — you’ll find that it contains plenty of quotes from pro-Trump voices and is, largely, balanced. It’s also widely accepted that Trump was guilty of incitement. But that doesn’t matter in this debate because the contested edit was deceptive, and it’s the clip The Daily Telegraph has shared over and over again.

Other accusations in Prescott’s memo include strident criticisms of the BBC’s Arabic service as pro-Hamas in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, claims BBC News’ LGBTQ+ desk engaged in “effective censorship” in the newsroom on trans issues and that BBC Verify published a factually inaccurate report alleging racist practices in the car insurance industry. He also argues that the BBC gave “disproportionate” coverage to Trump’s baseless and highly racist claims during the 2024 Presidential election that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. Prescott said that the BBC ignored complaints and took no action on the issues he raised.

The story was allowed by BBC management to run unaddressed for an entire week. That’s what led to the resignation of the Director General, Tim Davie, and CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, on Sunday night. The Telegraph, aided and abetted by the Daily Mail and its fallen star columnist Boris Johnson, was able to ratchet up the pressure in that time. The BBC’s silence could be and was framed as guilt. Finally, this afternoon, BBC Chair Samir Shah managed to send a letter to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee that addresses Prescott’s allegation.

Shah says that the suggestion that the BBC “sought to bury” Prescott’s concerns is “simply not true” and argues that the corporation has published corrections when it got things wrong, changed editorial guidance, made changes to leadership where there were underlying issues, and took formal disciplinary measures when needed. Shad apologised for the Panorama edit, which he called an “error of judgement” that “gave the impression of a direct call for violence”.

Shah goes on to explain:

This issue was considered and discussed as part of a wider review of the BBC’s US Election coverage, commissioned by [the Editorial Standards Committee] rather than handled as a specific programme complaint, given it had not attracted significant audience feedback and had been transmitted before the US election, so the point wasn’t pursued further at the time. The points raised in the review were relayed to the Panorama team, including the decision to make this edit. With hindsight, it would have been better to take more formal action.

He also revealed that BBC News has received 500 complaints about the issue since the Telegraph published its ‘expose’.

The Telegraph’s aim in this whole affair is summed up by the headline of its From The Editor newsletter published this lunchtime — BBC plunged into an existential crisis. In the Telegraph’s ideal world, the BBC would not exist, and it’s engaged in a project to make that a reality. Of course, the paper’s leader column claims otherwise:

This newspaper is not seeking to destroy the BBC but to ask legitimate questions about the accuracy of its journalism and the culture that underpins it. Anyone who has followed the events of the past few days and cares for the future of the BBC should have been appalled.

Looking to The Daily Telegraph as an arbiter of journalistic accuracy is like calling on the fox to give you advice on securing the hen house. It is, after all, the publication that was admonished by the usually toothless press regulator IPSO in August over its March 2025 front page headline that falsely claimed that 25% of sex crimes are “carried out by foreigners”. A month earlier, The Daily Mail was criticised by IPSO for a story that falsely claimed “one in 12 living in London is an illegal migrant”. The publisher defended itself by saying… it had lifted the claim from The Daily Telegraph. These are only recent examples of how the Telegraph plays fast and loose with facts.

Of course, the inevitable comeback is that no one is required to pay for The Daily Telegraph but you are obligated to contribute to the BBC via the licence fee if you want to watch television in the UK. That’s true, and it’s increasingly obvious that the licence fee system is not a long-term solution for funding the BBC.

What we’re watching right now is a very successful PR campaign for a myth. The notion that the BBC is a roiling mass of Marxists, a fundamentally left-wing outfit, feasting on public cash to push extreme leftism, is simply not true. When the right-wing press and its friends in talk radio and on GB News scream for impartiality, what they really mean is that they want the BBC to agree even more loudly with them on cultural issues. The BBC is, in fact, culturally conservative on many issues — on economics, on the monarchy, on immigration, on poverty and benefits.

The BBC will continue to be battered down by its critics on the Right. There is no new Director-General who would be sufficiently right-wing unless their intention was also to tear down the BBC as an organisation. The BBC is the biggest competitor for every other media organisation in the country. It’s the white whale and the way it uses its website makes every national and local newspaper livid. It dominates the market and does far too much, but if we allow the Right to harpoon it, things will be worse.

The BBC is an establishment creature, and the licence fee structure means it is always going to be beholden to the establishment. The BBC’s natural position is arguing for the status quo; that’s why it’s so bureaucratic, slow-moving, and prone to being shot by both sides. Since its very beginning, the concept of ‘impartiality’ has been an easy thing to weaponise against the BBC. It’s most effective in the hands of the Right, because it has more outlets for amplifying its complaints. When the Left sees bias in BBC coverage, its arguments are dismissed. When the Right does, it’s a national scandal. And each time that happens, the BBC becomes more scared, more inclined to acquiesce to the demands of people who’d like to see it burned to the ground.

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If you want to read more about the BBC and the long history of problems with the concept of impartiality, there’s a whole chapter on it in my book Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters

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