Many of us doze off to the soothing sound of the BBC’s Shipping Forecast because Radio 4 is always in our ears. There will be no advertisements or jolting music fillers, if you discount the British national anthem which signals the station’s switch to the world Service at 1am. Then there’s programming through the night, much of it from BBC reporters in far flung corners of the Earth, interspersed with live news bulletins. All of it enlightening and distracting and entirely free to everyone in the dark hours.
That calm, global predawn company is just one of the reasons why the BBC is beloved. Farming Today at 5.45am rolls into Radio 4’s flagship three-hour Today programme followed by shows as diverse as More or Less (a quick, droll, expert breakdown of dodgy statistics); You Do Not Have to Say Anything (presented by a criminal barrister); the institution that is Woman’s Hour and Child, a tenderly informative series about child development soundly based on science, history and society, without a TikTok nanny in sight.
And that’s just one thread of the vast and extraordinary BBC, lost entirely in the bitter maelstrom of the leaked memo criticising its handling of transgender issues, Israel/Gaza and the splicing of two parts of Donald Trump’s notorious January 6th speech.
The BBC can mess up badly – and some perspective may be useful. Its Brexit coverage was terrible enough to alienate this listener for several years.
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Brexit wasn’t just a huge story. It raised profound questions about identity, destiny, the sovereignty of parliament, objective truth, corrupt politics and – not least – the malignancy of a large proportion of its media, leaching daily toxins into politics and society. While Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson et al grabbed priceless, unchallenged chunks of airtime in a circus of brazen lies and distortion, the BBC carried on with its “on the one hand, on the other hand” blancmange of false equivalences and “balance”. A few obscure economists who said Brexit would trigger a boom were given equal space to the clear (and clearly sane) majority who warned it would do the opposite.
Worse, the BBC missed the Irish dimension by an ocean.
[ The Irish Times view on public service media: a principle worth defendingOpens in new window ]
The backstop story was forever carried via Westminster arguments and Westminster maths. Theresa May’s 2017 outline deal with the EU was greeted as a Westminster triumph with only minor genuflections towards the Irish conundrum that it left nakedly unresolved. Dublin-based journalism got barely a look in. “Overall, the coverage was distinctly lacking in curiosity and depth about both the Irish economy and Irish politics.” The words in that paragraph are not mine but those of Mark Damazer, a former Radio 4 controller, writing in Prospect magazine in 2019.
For a reconciled BBC listener, the handling of that catastrophe seems inexplicable even now. Placed alongside the fathomless cultural and political and economic divisions inflicted by Brexit, the latest eruptions against the broadcaster don’t even come close. They simply reopen the deep livid scars in political and cultural life created by Brexit, the original sin.
But here’s the point: if in the vastness of the BBC’s operations it was sometimes limply ineffective and made serious errors of judgment, it was never malign.
The sport of kicking it is decades older than Brexit, but what makes this latest session so compelling is the nakedly co-ordinated right-wing push to eviscerate it, finally. In one telling of it, the internal putsch has been led by the Boris Johnson-appointed board member Robbie Gibb, ardent Brexiteer and former Tory 10 Downing St communications director. (Imagine if Alistair Campbell had been made a BBC board member by a Labour government?) The political pressure is externally evident in the BBC’s relentless platforming, again, of Farage – the begetter of Brexit – and his handful of MPs.
US media companies are already eyeing up chunks of British media, such as ITV (which houses the exemplary Channel 4 news unit) and Channel 5. Elon Musk is calling for civil war on British streets. And Donald Trump is threatening to bankrupt one of the last British great media icons left standing, cheered along by a rabid bunch of British “patriots”.
So deep and destructive are the BBC board divisions, its members have been squabbling like children rather than address the oncoming Trump juggernaut.
[ Why the BBC has apologised over a Donald Trump speech edit, and what happens nextOpens in new window ]
It has finally apologised and removed the offending Panorama programme – the splicing of which went entirely unnoticed for months until the internal “dossier” calling the edit “completely misleading” was somehow leaked to the Telegraph.
Trump’s billion-dollar defamation threat is in effect an attempt to bankrupt the BBC. He regards it as appropriate compensation for “the overwhelming financial and reputation harm” he has suffered and would see it as “a win for truth”.
With its big, ridiculous mistake, the BBC has played into the hands of an authoritarian liar already working to intimidate and destroy critical media while allowing his Alice in Wonderland press secretary to call the BBC “one hundred per cent fake news” and a “propaganda machine”.
Worse, many will read the BBC’s craven surrender as confirmation that his version of January 6th is true. No amount of rewriting history will change what Trump did to the United States that day. It led to impeachment by the House of Representatives and an acquittal by the Senate, and later a federal indictment (agreed by a grand jury), which was dropped only because he was re-elected. The notion that he has a reputation to harm is ludicrous.
This is why some BBC supporters are imploring the broadcaster to show some spine and meet him in court. A crowdfunding campaign might be in order.
