The BBC: What's wrong, and how it might be fixed

When top BBC journalist and Christian Robin Aitken put together a dossier of what he felt were glaring examples of biased broadcasts, and sent it to the then Director General and Board of the BBC in 2007, he knew his career was on the line. What he had not expected – as a BBC executive and flagship Today Programme reporter - was to be ignored completely.

Instead of addressing the message, they pensioned him off.

Robin was just 50. He took the pension and wrote a string of books alleging BBC bias, the most successful being The Noble Liar.

In an interview with me in 2019, he said the BBC’s problem was that it had "systematically destroyed the foundational beliefs and practices which informed the lives of previous generations."

Today, he feels vindicated: “Seeing as I have been banging on about this for so many years, yes, of course I feel vindicated. I see this as proof positive that there is bias,” he says.

Now that bias is plain for everyone else to see, if they so choose. With Michael Prescott’s 8000-word memo to the BBC Board last May going ignored until he leaked it to The Telegraph last week, the BBC is at an existential moment that cannot be addressed with a mere change of the top brass.

Donald Trump

Without signs of genuine remorse, without drastic change in how it views its mission, and a reverting to the values that founded it, the BBC will remain a force not just of national decline, but of international harm. President Trump himself is now threatening to sue the BBC for being made to appear to incite a violent riot, even a coup, at the Capitol, through doctored video footage. Trained sceptic though I am, even I believed it, only to discover last week that footage of two different bits of Trump’s speech, nearly an hour apart, had been spliced together.

As with NATO contributions, Trump’s threat will concentrate minds and produce a result nothing else seems to do. And some may feel that Trump’s seemingly wild talk of “fake news” proves in fact to have at least some substance in reality.

Middle East

But what of the damage done to prospects for the Middle East? Perhaps most searing of all the complaints levelled at the corporation in Prescott’s memo was the data produced to prove bias by BBC Arabic against the Israelis in Gaza. Who can say how much this has further embittered a whole generation both in the Middle East and elsewhere? The memo says for instance that while the BBC’s main news website posted 19 separate stories about the hostages taken by Hamas on the day of its terror attack, on BBC Arabic there were none. There were no articles critical of Hamas on the BBC Arabic site, and just four on the English site.

This is of a piece with complaints I personally received from pastors in Northern Nigeria about the BBC Hausa service, as long ago as the early 2000s: that the service was biased against Christians. Independent research later proved this to be correct. Ironic then that the BBC’s motto, since 1945, has been: “Nation shall speak peace to nation.”

The Guardian

The reaction to all the furore by the BBC and similar organs like The Guardian, is not hopeful. Instead of carefully reflecting on what truth there may be in the dossier, there have been this week ad hominem attacks on Prescott himself, and even talk of a “political coup”, as if truth were merely a power game, which of course to staff brought up on Foucault and atheist continental philosophy, it is. (Michel Foucault’s thought centres on how power and knowledge are intertwined, showing that what societies accept as “truth” is shaped by shifting systems of power that regulate and define people’s behaviour, identity, and understanding of reality.)

Prescott, they say, is a friend of Sir Robbie Gibb, Boris Johnson’s pick for Non-Executive Director of the BBC Board. Yet Prescott himself has written that he has never been a member of a political party, and for years was Political Correspondent, then Political Editor of The Sunday Times. His forebears were indentured Guyanese labourers. It is difficult, then, to fit that into the “required narrative”.

Despite such credentials, “every criticism of BBC coverage comes from the anti-progressive culture-war playbook”, opines Jane Martinson in The Guardian. But such a statement is the very essence of groupthink. It sucks the oxygen out of all genuine inquiry, and complaint. It is indicative of the very destruction of the culture that Aitken warned of. Just more of the same.

What is needed is far more radical.

Christian culture

Unless the BBC is prepared to reckon with its faults, and pay more attention to what it owes to the culture that engendered journalism in the first place, the BBC will one day be broken up. That formative culture was Christian, and its values included honest debate, based on public truth, as discerned in Scripture.

Lord Reith is once again spinning in his grave. Only those values that founded the BBC can provide the resources to restore it.

The inscription above the old entrance foyer at Broadcasting House, Portland Place, reads: “This Temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors of Broadcasting House in the year 1931, Sir John Reith being Director-General. It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.”

See also ‘I was forced out of BBC News over gender-critical views’ in The Times - Ed.