To fix the BBC, focus on competence and cash

Tim Davie and Deborah Turness have resigned as director-general and chief executive of BBC News respectively. Some thoughts on that below.

Under pressure

Forced out by rightwing members of the BBC’s board (which will ultimately appoint the new director-general) or by their own mistakes? Many inside the BBC itself are saying the former: the best piece on those claims can be found on the BBC’s own website, as it happens.

Frankly, what we’ve seen is the inevitable conclusion of a period in which the BBC has been unable to admit fault, or even analyse its faults, other than through the lens of whether it is politically biased.

But we didn’t need Michael Prescott’s leaked, anecdotal memo detailing his concerns about bias to tell us that the BBC has a bad record of learning lessons. The BBC has commissioned two thematic reviews on its coverage of taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt and of immigration. The lessons of those reviews have not been internalised and have barely been acted upon.

I don’t mean that I disagree with this latest report about the corporation’s output, it’s just to say that “the BBC is poor at taking on criticism and actually learning from it” is not new.

Editing Donald Trump’s speech in a way that makes it seem as if remarks the best part of an hour apart followed on naturally is part of a broader culture of sloppiness and a flight from detail at the BBC. It is part of the same thing that has seen the long-running show HardTalk cancelled, BBC Parliament’s funding slashed, the coverage of party conferences reduced to a shadow of what they once were, Newsnight’s investigations pared back, and dozens of other retreats from quality journalism.

And that has happened because from 2016 to 2022, the BBC faced both financial and political pressure to do so. The big mistake, I think, that many of the corporation’s rightwing critics have made this week is seeing this primarily as about the BBC’s political bias or the private views of its journalists. But it’s hardly surprising that a broadcaster that has faced pressure not to give too much weight to expert economists on Brexit has also rebuffed historians complaining about history programmes in which polemicists were preferred as guests and talking heads.

Or to take the most recent two general elections: it is not, I think, a coincidence that both the Conservatives in 2019 and Labour in 2024 were able to get away with promises on spending, tax and borrowing that could not be met. The problem isn’t that we have a deliberately biased BBC, it’s that we have a BBC that has been consciously reduced in its scope and bullied into dumbing down and retreating.

Since Labour came into office, we’ve essentially had in Lisa Nandy a culture secretary who might as well be doing the job from witness protection. The BBC’s senior leadership has in a sense been able to live on borrowed time. But sooner or later those pressures and the culture they have created at BBC News would result in a mistake that would explode.

(Also while I was away: Nandy asked: “Why shouldn’t the next Oscar winner or Bafta winner come from Wigan or Barnsley or Bradford?” It is surely not too much to ask that the culture secretary know that this year’s Bafta winners include a winner from Barnsley.)

Change will only come if both the BBC board and the politicians that ultimately appoint that board realise that the corporation’s problems in News are fundamentally about money and competence: those failures have political consequences but not, I think, political causes.

That the BBC board’s chair, Samir Shah, has been absent from the airwaves and has nothing to say thus far about suggestions that the board prevented an apology being issued last week is something already being noticed at Westminster. This latest BBC row may still have some way to run.

What does the Budget mean for your money? On November 28, watch Dan Neidle, Claer Barrett, Tej Parikh and Stuart Kirk run their rule over Rachel Reeves’ announcements and discuss what they mean for your personal finances. It’s free for FT subscribers.

Now try this

I had a lovely time in Madeira. On the flight there I listened to Emma Rawicz’s delightful new record Inkyra on a loop. I’m really looking forward to hearing it live as part of the London Jazz Festival (full line-up here).