Mick Hartley

After the two top BBC resignations, the problems are: first that it’s seen as all down to the Trump Panorama business when other issues seem to me to be more significant – in particular the long-term capture by gender ideology and the bias against Israel – and second, that after the ritual sacrifice, as it were, to appease the “right-wing critics”, it’ll be back to business as usual.

Sonia Sodha in the Times – What’s the point of the BBC if it can’t be impartial?

[T]he BBC’s coverage of gender ideology too often takes as fact the quasi-religious belief everyone has a gendered soul called a “gender identity” and that to dissent is bigoted.

This has led the BBC to ignore altogether important national stories about children’s healthcare, such as the young people who have detransitioned after irreversible hormone treatment. Other stories are grossly one-sided: for example, congratulatory tales of male athletes self-identifying into women’s competitions that don’t include any voices on legal issues raised, or mention the risks to fairness and safety in women’s sport.

Decisions of the BBC’s editorial complaints unit appear racked with bias. It has dismissed complaints from the public about the corporation obscuring the fact that male killers who identify as female are male, by referring to them as women and using female pronouns for them: partisan and misleading language.

But it found the presenters Justin Webb and Martine Croxall had broken impartiality guidelines, the former for clarifying that trans women are male, a critical fact to help listeners understand the story, and the latter for a facial expression it claimed gave the impression of personal opinion, as she corrected the ideological “pregnant people” in her script to the more neutral “pregnant women”.

BBC executives might argue this is just one issue, that feminist supporters of public service broadcasting like me should drop our obsession and rally behind a Beeb under bad-faith fire. This is to spectacularly miss the point.

There is an intellectually respectable argument against public service broadcasting that I do not support, and impartiality is key to countering it. If the publicly funded BBC proves as easily captured by partisan ideology as the next institution, the argument for it disintegrates.

Exactly so. Much of the anger directed at the BBC recently is because we all have to pay for it. We may grumble at the bias in particular newspapers, but then we can always stop buying and reading them. The BBC is different. Which is why, also, the recent “This is your BBC” ads are so annoying. No it isn’t: not any more.

It was right that Tim Davie and Deborah Turness stepped down, given their failure to grip the issue on impartiality. But their resignations are not in themselves a fix. Reading the BBC’s own news reports, you would be forgiven for thinking these scalps were claimed as a result of just one egregious error: the editing together of two parts of a Trump speech for a Panorama documentary in a way that made him appear to explicitly encourage the 2021 Capitol Hill riots.

As she resigned Turness asserted “recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.” This complacency is misplaced: the BBC’s output bias on a contested subject like sex and gender is not just the product of “mistakes” as she claimed, but of cultural and institutional capture. The BBC needs new leadership that toughens up its impartiality guidelines and makes clear that there is no place at the corporation for staff who try to undermine them, and therefore public trust in the whole BBC.

In assuming a bit part in the culture wars instead of rising above them, the BBC is risking its own demise. It is solely by ruthlessly examining what governance and editorial failures made it so vulnerable to unrepresentative groupthink that it can defeat its critics. Only the BBC can save itself.

It’s perhaps hard for those outside the UK to appreciate how central the BBC has been to British life since its founding. I still automatically go to their website for news, and they still produce some great TV. It’s just that they’ve become too stuck in their bubble, too smug, too partisan. They need a shake-up – and I’m not optimistic that we’re going to get one. There’ a huge “woke inertia” at the Beeb now, with all these bright progressive young graduates rising up the ranks, and it’s going to need more than some Tim Davie lookalike to stand up to it.