The Mad Farrago at the BBC

So Trump has collected two more big media scalps, this time across the Atlantic—the widely respected duo of BBC director general Tim Davie and its head of news Deborah Turness. On Truth Social, he gloated, “These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.”

Outgoing BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness

The BBC triggered a mine of its own making. The sloppy-as-hell video editing of Trump’s January 6th speech in a 2024 documentary for Panorama—splicing together two different quotes that made it look as if Trump was directly urging protesters to walk to the Capitol and “fight like hell”—exploded last week with a leaked memo itemizing a litany of alleged bias (claims of transgender mania, antisemitism, liberal blindness on immigration, etc.) from a former independent adviser to the BBC’s standards committee. The editing blunder was a gift to Trump, who made a festive threat to sue the BBC for $1 billion (good luck with that) if it does not make a “full and fair retraction.”

It’s mystifying why it took a year to surface such a sensitive error and why the Panorama program director did not fall on his sword, after a fulsome institutional apology. But the Beeb is hopeless at acknowledging mistakes, mired as it is in committees and processes set up to protect its probity, but instead induce herbivore slow-motion. (John Cleese once joked that BBC executives would have rejected Fawlty Towers today—too funny, not enough meetings.) For days, Deborah Turness had a statement ready to go out, acknowledging Panorama’s malpractice. But the board dithered and decided instead to send a deadly explanatory letter to the parliamentary committee that oversees media, rather than the full-throated public mea culpa that was clearly required.

Boris Johnson threatened to withhold his license fee unless the BBC “comes clean.”

Fur Flies

It’s no surprise that The Daily Telegraph, empurpled megaphone of the right, led the anti-BBC charge—or that Trump, on Truth Social, thanked it “for exposing these Corrupt ‘Journalists.’” The paper’s front page displayed the familiar, disheveled mug shot of former pantomime PM Boris Johnson, ousted from Downing Street for his own ethical lapses, foaming about the BBC’s moral malfeasance. (Lest we forget, Johnson’s own nomination for BBC chairman, Richard Sharp, had to quit after it was revealed that, shortly before his appointment, Sharp had helped broker an £800K loan for Boris.)

There was the usual pile-on of BBC haters in the right-wing press, including in The Daily Mail, The Spectator, and GB News, a Fox-modeled TV enterprise where Sir Robbie Gibb, a vocally anti-liberal Boris appointee to the BBC standards board, is a former editorial advisor. Inside the building, Gibb and his allies are seen as politically driven disrupters, determined to force the institution to the right.

This farrago of intrigue and press onslaught was too much for Tim Davie, who felt he didn’t have the mojo left to lead the BBC into the next embattled round of license fee negotiations. He’d weathered so many external and internal shitstorms, including a perplexingly bad in-house decision to air a Gaza documentary acquired from an outside production house and narrated, it turned out, by the young son of a Hamas official. That’s the trouble with oversight nannies rather than robust editors. They fail to ask the most obvious question: Who exactly is this kid?

But I am, nonetheless, gutted about BBC’s top management being hounded out of their jobs. Having worked closely with outgoing news chief Deborah Turness on my annual Truth Tellers summit in London, I know her to be a passionate, astute professional with a tiger-like protectiveness of editorial integrity. And it will be hard to find a more cool-minded, sound leader than Davie. I lament another successful assault on a media institution that has a stellar record of brilliant, brave, and honest journalism. Every day, the Beeb exhibits the virtuosity of its excellence as a global news and investigative omnivore and a creative force in drama and entertainment. Their coverage of seminal royal events is masterful, not least because it is the only channel that knows when to shut up at key majestic moments. The BBC World Service brings vital tidings of truth in 43 languages to information-starved corners of the world, and hooray for Celebrity Traitors, whose bluffing ingenuity drew 12 million viewers for its first season finale. The producers, anchors, and researchers from the organization with whom I have collaborated over the years are drilled in standards that reach high and dig deep. The BBC’s trust must be earned—and interrogated—but pockets of misjudgment should not be traduced as institutional bias.

Trashing the BBC—as indispensable as it is impossible, to paraphrase Winston Churchill—has been a blood sport for decades. Because everyone who owns a telly has to pay a license fee, everyone hollers their point of view. But what’s new and alarming are the acrid gusts of MAGA mendacity from across the ocean polluting the debate. The seepage of Trump tactics is now an international phenomenon. Who needs know-nothing White House flak Karoline Leavitt mouthing off about British citizens being “forced to foot the bill for a leftist propaganda machine”? There was a horrible echo of Trump’s institutional demolition derby in Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s charge that the BBC is rotten to the core: “The new leadership must now deliver genuine reform of the culture of the BBC, top to bottom.”

Rue Britannia

There is no country better at harboring a gloomy self-image than England. (During my editorship of Vanity Fair, my diary notes that when I called British writers, I heard “the rain in their voice.”) But now, after years of Tory austerity, the failure of Brexit, and the tanking economy, there’s a destructive energy in the national mood. Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s sepulchral style cannot break through the spiral of national self-denigration. He’s currently polling even lower than the civilian formerly known as Prince Andrew, who would still, by the way, have an august title, but for his forensic takedown by Emily Maitlis in that notorious BBC interview. Starmer seems unable to conjure a new dawn, in which Britain no longer rules the waves but can nimbly navigate the currents. The ​passé glamor of James Bond has been replaced by the scruffy resourcefulness of Slow Horses’ Jackson Lamb, but, unlike Gary Oldman, Starmer has not been able to convince his people that there’s a slyer way of winning.

Cooler than Bond: Slow Horses’ Jackson Lamb (credit: Apple TV+)

In his resignation statement, BBC director general Tim Davie referred to the difficulty of managing in “these febrile times.” He should try living in the United States, where the viral chaos of the news environment provokes constant agita about what to believe. The BBC is the sanity gene in British national life. Addressing his shattered staff, Davie said he’s “fiercely proud of this organization” and that “we’ve got to fight for our journalism.” I urge Brits of every stripe to repudiate the monstering of the BBC and defend its enduring values to the death. To the barricades!