BBC on the rack

When standards fall, causing damage to personal reputations and endangering the livelihood of thousands of workers, someone must answer for it.

That’s how it should be, but not how it often is.

Last week we saw the BBC lose both its director-general – the most powerful person in British broadcasting – and its news director, because the buck stopped with them.

The spectacle of the BBC failing to live up to the highest broadcasting standards makes only its enemies happy, because most people regard the BBC as a beacon of excellence; yet gross errors of judgement are unsurprising, since the august organisation is part of a society in which values and notions of probity are changing.

President Trump last week threatened to sue the publicly funded BBC for £1 billion, nearing one-third of its annual operating budget, paid by British people directly to the BBC to fulfil its renewable ten-year charter, which it agrees with the government. Trump is seeking compensation for alleged defamation through the distortion of his January 6, 2021 Washington speech in a BBC Panorama programme broadcast in the UK.

Panorama is BBC TV News’ flagship documentary-style weekly programme, which since 1953 has been known for its high-level investigations and the impact of its journalism, although it has erred before – a Panorama reporter once duped Princess Diana into telling her story.

But it was also Panorama that led the way in the precipitous fall from grace of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite child, Prince Andrew, now stripped of his royal titles and known merely as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Andrew is in this pickle because he and other members of the privileged rich, including Donald Trump, were friends of the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew was accused by a woman who said she was forced to have sex with him when she was aged 17, and photos show them together. Andrew settled out of court.

President Trump is in a similar Epstein bind because on the campaign trail he promised to release the Epstein files, which he has now reneged on. The actual nature of the connection between the two men is still unknown, but Trump’s supporters are mad at him, while his Rottweiler press secretary tries to deflect by briefing against the BBC, which regularly shows a suggestive clip of the two men chatting at a party.

The irony of the situation has escaped no one. Trump is a convicted felon whose reputation is already in tatters, despite rolling back some of the legal decisions against him, and his supreme power as head of an increasingly evil empire. That he has sued umpteen US media houses and is threatening the BBC for reputational damage is just another gross absurdity.

Nonetheless, the BBC has found itself in the large jaws of some very nasty foes, and it only has itself to blame.

There are stylistic conventions in television for indicating that different parts of a sentence are edited together. The producer has a duty of fairness to everyone concerned and must follow the rules. The producer/director of the contested Panorama documentary failed to do so, leading us to believe that the president told the rioters to march on the Capitol and to riot. It may have been his intention – but Trump’s speech did not reveal it.

The chronology of events was also incorrect and compounded the misleading report.

We do not associate such poor journalism with the BBC, yet it now turns out that in its highly reputable nightly current affairs TV programme Newsnight, a similarly unsignalled elision marred an earlier report on Trump’s bid for power.

That error was underlined by a commentator at the time, but ignored by a senior editor. The Panorama violation of the rules was underlined much later by an internal watchdog committee member, appointed by an actively pro-Trump BBC board member. But BBC bosses failed to act, leading to a leak to a right-wing UK newspaper which purports, like Trump, that the BBC is biased to the left.

Apart from Trump’s financial threat, the BBC, importantly, is struggling to argue that it is impartial, one of its main tenets, even if it erred.

As a former current affairs editor managing a team of news and current affairs producers and presenters, I can testify that I never knew their political preferences. All journalists left their politics at the front door.

Charges of partiality are legendary from the right-wing British media, which advocate the dismantling of the BBC, one of the great British institutions, admired internationally and trusted by citizens.

Unfairly, it is held to higher standards than other broadcasters and is under constant political attack.

But it is difficult for the BBC to convince us that its editors are in control. At the end of this crisis and to ensure its future, the BBC must overhaul its management structure and its TV personnel must abandon their customary hubris.