The BBC, the biggest broadcaster in the world, is in turmoil. Where there is turmoil, these days it’s also common to find President Donald Trump. So it is in this case. He is threatening a $1 billion lawsuit.
The BBC’s two topmost executives, Director General Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, chief executive of the news division, have quit amid a scandal involving reporters and editors doctoring video to make it look, falsely, as though Trump directly called for violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The departing pair made statements about accepting “ultimate responsibility” and the “buck” stopping with them. But one detects the flavor of humbug. Those of us who’ve watched and publicly lamented the BBC’s slide over the past 30 years into left-wing propaganda can be forgiven for asking why high-minded responsibility only occurs to those running the place on their way out the door and why it didn’t guide them when it could have made a difference to the quality of their content.
The BBC, or “Beeb,” used to be referred to in Britain as “auntie” because of its dated and easily mockable middle-class dignity. But those sobriquets and that image were themselves outdated long ago and have done much to hide the fact that the corporation has adopted every fashionable left-wing idea, radical or bogus, for more than a generation.
It has, for example, been relentlessly biased against Trump and in favor of Democrats for the past decade, just as it was relentlessly biased in favor of the British socialist party and against Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party when I was reporting in Fleet Street in the 1980s and 1990s.
It has been on board, to take another example, the transgender agenda, even while more balanced news outlets and most members of the public recognize that the issue is driven by the psychological ailment of a small group of people, not by facts and science. It was reported just last week that staff were “keeping anti transgender perspectives off the air,” so BBC output on the subject had become “a constant drip feed of one-sided stories.”
It is impossible to single out the Beeb’s worst bias. Perhaps it is the gaslighting of the public on the wonderfulness of multiculturalism and mass immigration. But the corporation’s most notorious tendentiousness is probably displayed in its antipathy toward Israel as the Jewish state fights, or fought, its defensive and existential war against the Islamist terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah.
To cite just the best-known example, the BBC had to apologize and correct its reporting after a terrorist missile hit a hospital in Gaza shortly after the war began in October 2023 because a reporter said on air that he could see no possibility other than that the hit came from an Israeli air strike. It is difficult to report from the fog of war, and all journalists make mistakes (like all their fellow human beings). But Hamas had immediately blamed Israel, and auntie, predisposed to hostility against Israel, went along with it.
Since the BBC displays biases identical to those of the great mass of leftist news organizations, you might ask why its failings should be of particular concern. The answer goes back to my reference to it as the biggest broadcaster in the world. Many readers may be surprised to hear that a media corporation in Britain, where the population is only one-fifth the size of America’s, is bigger than any U.S. broadcaster.
The reasons are partly historical, going back to the global reach and power of Britain’s past. But it is also because the BBC is a state broadcaster, financed not from commercial activity in the form of advertising but from British taxpayers’ pockets.
Households in Britain with one or more TVs each pay a tax of 175 pounds ($230) a year (although some 300,000 are derelict in their payments). It’s called a license fee, and to American ears it is absurd to hear that anyone needs a license to watch TV. It is indeed absurd. The fee is a hypothecated tax — that is, a tax from which the proceeds pay for a particular government function. The function in this case being broadcasting. License revenue doesn’t just sluice into the British Treasury but pays for the BBC’s operations, including its 21,000 staff worldwide.
The reason there is extra outrage over the BBC doctoring video to press a biased ideological perspective is not simply because the BBC is huge and influential, but that the dupes who are fed the admixture of news and dross through their TV screens are obliged by law to pay for it. They can switch off the television or change channels, but they will still be paying for their fellow citizens to be propagandized. And the doctoring isn’t an isolated incident, but part of a pattern as revealing as mistakes in one’s tax returns all going in the same direction.
A debate that has rumbled for decades is restarting again. It is over whether the license fee should be scrapped and the BBC should be obliged to finance itself like every other media company. The most prominent proponents of such a move over the years have been conservatives. I have argued for it myself.
But there is a problem. Having yet another commercially financed left-wing broadcaster is not an attractive proposition to those of us who want conservative ideas considered fairly and unbiased news disseminated on at least an equal basis to the public as are left-wing perspectives.
It would, not in principle but in practice, be so much better to have a massive broadcaster that was obliged to provide even-handed coverage of current affairs and politics.
This accounts for the response to the BBC scandal of Nigel Farage, friend of Trump and leader of the Reform Party, which has overtaken the Conservative and socialist Labor parties, and now holds a commanding lead in British opinion polls.
MAMDANI RIPS OFF HIS SMILING MASK
Farage did not call for an end to the license fee, but for root-and-branch reform of the BBC. In other words, keep auntie big, keep her publicly financed, but make her fair. Farage posted, “This is the BBC’s last chance. If they don’t get this right, there will be vast numbers of people refusing to pay the license fee.”
The conservative populist party on the rise hardly wants to see a massive broadcaster that might be forced into fairness and balance instead unleashed into the corporate sector saturated in left-of-center biases.
