BBC under attack

Who’d want to take up the about-to-be vacant position of Director General of the BBC? Or for that matter the about-to-be vacant position of director of news at the most trusted news organisation in the world? Both incumbents have resigned after two weeks of turmoil over a Panorama documentary that on any reading, committed a serious editorial error which has been weaponised by enemies of public broadcasting. 

Worse still, the attacks on the BBC are being echoed in Australia against the ABC, without, it appears, evidence of any wrongdoing. But evidence can be at best distorted and at worst disregarded in a culture war that pivots around taxpayer funded public broadcasting, which its enemies would like to see end. 

First to the BBC. Panorama is an externally produced documentary program, much like the ABC’s Four Corners in format and intent. In the lead up to last year’s US presidential election, Panorama produced (and the BBC aired) a program about the dramatic events of January 6th 2021 in which the US Capitol in Washington DC was attacked by supporters of Donald Trump, while a joint session of Congress gathered to count and endorse electoral college votes putting Joe Biden in the White House. President Trump had addressed the same mob not long before. His speech was, as usual, long and rambling. Panorama spliced together two ends of it – leaving viewers with the impression that he had directly encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight to keep him in power.  

Panorama could have easily avoided the damage now done to its brand and to the BBC by telling viewers that the two clips of the President were spoken 50 minutes apart. Splicing them together did give the impression that Donald Trump was inciting violence. And in journalism ethics 101, deceiving or misleading viewers in this way is a grave crime. Strike 1 against the BBC.  

But how the editorial breach was brought to the attention of the BBC’s editorial leaders and who brought them can’t be ignored. The claims about the Panorama program were contained in a 19-page dossier written by Michael Prescott, a former News Corp journalist and a former external advisor on the BBC's editorial Standards Committee. That dossier was leaked to a conservative newspaper, The Telegraph. It contained not only the complaints of bias in the Panorama program but claims of anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza/Israel war, as well as claims of biased coverage of issues related to transgender people, all of them right-wing sore points. 

Prescott claims the BBC refused to acknowledge the complaints. Strike 2 against the BBC.  

In a less volatile media landscape, even two egregious errors might have been a salvageable disaster. But a pile up of claims left unaddressed is more than damaging in a world where the President of the United States regularly labels news media as ‘fake’ and even ‘enemies of the people’, where publicly funded broadcasters (including the ABC) are regularly accused of bias by commercial enemies, right- and left-leaning forces with very loud bugles. Trust in news media is, as we know, already at an all-time low. Social media has given us a platform to air our own unverified views, often tethered only vaguely to any truth. The values which drive the BBC and the ABC – objectivity, impartiality, fairness – matter for little if they are in opposition to what the majority want to believe about any particular issue or indeed, what left- or right-wing forces believe. Good faith arguments about shocking editorial errors – as with the Panorama program – become a quick and easy disguise for bad faith arguments about the merits of public broadcasting. They can become loud enough to move governments in their commitments to continued funding of broadcasters like the BBC and the ABC which like all media organisations – publicly funded or commercial – make mistakes.  

Given the right-leaning personae around the Panorama breach, it’s likely the aim was not to get the BBC to do better, but to inflict damage, possibly existential damage on the BBC. Despite the best efforts of Sky and News Corp to accuse the ABC’s Four Corners program of committing the same error as Panorama, it’s been swatted away. Any close look at the program produced on the January 6th insurrection reveals immediately that the long speech by the then still President was not cut and spliced in the same way that occurred on Panorama. But the mere fact such a claim is made indicates the very same forces at play in the UK are at play here too.  

The ABC, like the BBC, has its problems. It occasionally breaches its own editorial guidelines. It can be accused of having a too narrow (and a too left-leaning) scope of issues it considers important enough to report on. It occasionally shows the same hubris by refusing to fess up to mistakes (The Ghost Train Fire and, lest we forget, the Antoinette Lattouf debacle). But the vast bulk of its output is a public service, executed in the public interest. The newish Managing Director of the ABC, Hugh Marks came out punching this week against Sky’s accusations. More important will be a renewed commitment to double down on what’s important about public broadcasting – independent journalism performed objectively, impartially and fairly.  

References:

https://www.britannica.com/event/January-6-U-S-Capitol-attack 
 
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial 
 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating-internal-bbc-memo-in-full/#the-introductionundefined (paywalled) 
 
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/people-are-turning-away-news-heres-why-it-may-be-happening 
 
https://www.abc.net.au/about/media-centre/statements-and-responses/abc-statement-on-downfall/106000406 
 
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2021/video/NC2103H001S00 
 
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/abc-s-ghost-train-fire-expose-is-fascinating-but-flawed-20210412-p57ifh.html 
 
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/bbc-meltdown-sparks-disquiet-over-abcs-own-impartiality-and-journalistic-blind-spots/news-story/9600961c33474e988fb35d761f7622ed 
 
https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/chris-kenny/travesty-not-a-mistake-bbc-and-abc-fallout-continues-after-misleading-reporting/video/f8508cc6dfd0719795bd38c190f520be