The truth about impartiality at the BBC

And the hysteria of the current "crisis"

It is not for me to defend the BBC. I have spoken before about my views of the corporation and its limitations. I am not convinced that it is intellectually equipped to deal with the changes in the media/political landscape in the 21st century. I think, historically, that it has made the UK media quite stolid, and dimmed competition, though technological change is dulling that effect. It can be arrogant and opaque. It tends to treat its own staff poorly, and has many of the defects of any large public sector organisation, without the merits. Its domestic coverage these days tends too often to the banal. My second stint there, as Policy Editor of Newsnight, was a period of some contrast: I worked with extraordinarily talented colleagues, reporting on Covid, care homes, the exams crisis, the scandal of the building safety crisis- reporting of which I am deeply proud, yet likewise it was a time of profound disillusionment with an organisation I had revered since I was a boy. I could feel the place lose its nerve, against a Conservative government of which it was deeply afraid, and the seeds of much of the contemporary crisis being sown. I have little sympathy for Tim Davie, precisely because he made that worse, acting at best naively, for reasons I will explain.

Despite all of that, because of all of that, I feel compelled to write, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the BBC’s current travails over the Panorama documentary are a sad parable of our contemporary political madnesses. Primarily, they illuminate the continued grip of our political discourse by an increasingly fevered right-wing information ecosystem. This story, a relatively minor editing mishap, has become an obsession of the Mail, the Telegraph and the Times/Sunday Times. It is hardly new that these newspapers will use any weapon available to beat the BBC. It is newer that much of the media takes its cues from now the now far-right X, which skews coverage even further. What is also new, is that this last year, we have become accustomed to the US/UK media space increasingly fusing, to the point now we have the President of the United States threatening to sue and effectively bankrupt our national broadcaster, and being cheered to the rafters by British “patriots” on the cultural right for doing so. Of course Nick Robinson is right to say that it is a campaign to destroy the BBC itself, now topped with the presidential seal.

There have been real and appalling scandals in the BBC’s recent history. This is not one of them. Any sane political/media environment would treat it as what it is: a minor, to the point of trivial embarrassment. Instead the reaction has been hysterical. The edit in question was clearly a mistake. It was unfair to Trump because it gave the impression of his saying something that he did not. But how much does it matter? Did the edit fundamentally mislead the viewer about the events of that period and Trump’s role within them? Can anyone credibly claim that the overall subject and critique of the documentary was not based in truth and fact? 1) Donald Trump lied about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and continues to lie about it to this day. In so doing he introduced a toxin into American politics which will take a generation to exorcise. 2) Trump did incite the mob on January 6th. Put simply, had he not lied about the election, they would never have been there in the first place. The conclusion that Trump was instrumental in that violence is borne out from the impeachment House and Senate votes, which though below the threshold of conviction were bipartisan, and the subsequent Congressional inquiry into the events of the riots which set Trump’s role out in meticulous detail. Trump then proceeded to make clear how un-seriously he took the violence by pardoning everyone involved, many of whom have spoken to the authorities and explicitly said that the only reason they were there that day and did what they did was because of Trump. These aren’t opinions, these are facts and if the BBC cannot robustly defend itself on that basis then it is truly lost. The tragedy of this fiasco is that it has played into Trump and MAGA’s hands, both in seeking to gag news organisations they dislike (see the legal threats to American broadcasters and newspapers) but in helping them to erase the truth about what happened that day and Trump’s central role in it. How’s that for impartiality?

Instead of some proportion from much of the British media class, we are treated to the tragicomic absurdity of a former British prime minister willing to admonish the national broadcaster and demand the resignation of its Director General, all in the name of defending Donald Trump’s reputation for truth-telling. But it’s worse than that- it is a textbook example of how populists win. We have the ridiculous carnival of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, of all people, admonishing the BBC for its lack of integrity. And they can get away with it, because no-one expects anything from them and yet we expect everything from the people and places who actually give a damn.

This is not to say that there aren’t searching questions to be asked about BBC impartiality. In my experience, there could be group think, sometimes that could lean leftward, especially at the height of identitarian politics at the start of this decade. As much as anything, that demonstrated the BBC’s tendency to move, unthinkingly, to wherever received wisdom is at any given moment- something it will be doing again, but in a rightward direction, right now, given the ideological winds have shifted. And the tendency to move right is always stronger than left, because there is terror of the right in a way the BBC does not possess of liberalism or the left. Do we seriously believe anyone inside New Broadcasting House fears the Green Party? Or Labour? Just ask yourself, would the BBC champion a presenter who was consistently asking robust questions about the effect of the recent Supreme Court judgment on trans rights? Or would they be more likely to champion someone who was clearly gender critical? Charles Moore made a comment on the Today programme this morning that only someone who had never worked for Corporation could make: that all its biases come from a liberal direction. No- rather the only complaints it fears are from a conservative one.

When I was there, at the height of Boris Johnson’s strength, that fear was ubiquitous. Scripts were sometimes written with a view not solely to their impartiality or truth, but the management of perception of impartiality from one side of the spectrum. On one particularly depressing occasion, on a night when some aspect or other of Covid policy, after I refused to add any more qualification to an already nebulous script, a senior editor asked me what the Prime Minister (Johnson) might say if he saw the piece. He implied that he might accuse us of bias. I replied that I didn’t care, so long as we were confident we were not and had been fair. The beads of sweat were almost visible as he walked away. On another occasion, a BBC executive forbade me from writing for the New Statesman, imploring me to ask The Spectator instead, saying that would be perfectly fine. This sort of thing was commonplace. Moreover as the media and political environment has moved rightward, the BBC is still in its usual bland, mushy central position, with its boring set of dispositions- but it seems more left wing by default. It hasn’t moved- the environment has and continues to do so. But the biggest sin the BBC has in my experience, is that the BBC isn’t that political at all, that it doesn’t have enough truly political people of any type. It should more arch liberals, conservatives, socialists- so long as they can and are willing to think critically. Instead, it too often chooses not to think at all, because it’s easier, and safer- the intellectual crouch position. But that is precisely because it has been so terrified by the criticism it receives. The safe place for output is the stodgy and inoffensive, the twee and the banal. Is it institutionally biased? No. Is it institutionally unimaginative and insufficiently curious to all radical political ideas? Yes. Is it now institutionally risk averse? Yes. As a result it tends to a golden mean of boredom which is slowly guaranteeing its irrelevance. The BBC lessens itself because it is afraid, hoping to be both ubiquitous and unnoticed- an impossibility and trend which will only get worse after all of this.

But there are other more substantial questions for the BBC. What is a more serious concern around its reputation for impartiality? One misjudged edit- or a former Conservative Party director of communications, Robbie Gibb, who via a Boris Johnson appointment, still sits as a Non-Executive Director and on its Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board (EGSB)? Since I left, he has been joined by David Grossman, a former colleague of mine at Newsnight. He is now a Senior Editorial Adviser for the EGSB, whose brief it seems to be to investigate other journalists’ work when asked to ensure they are adhering to impartiality and BBC guidelines. Their alliance is of no surprise, they were friends- and their shared politics well known. Grossman and Gibb’s are names which keep cropping up in the Panorama story. According to The Guardian Gibb is said to have been instrumental in the appointment of Michael Prescott as an adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines & Standards Committee and that they are friends. Prescott is the author of the dossier which The Telegraph published a week ago setting this whole thing off, citing the Panorama edit as evidence of institutional bias against Trump, plus a suite of other alleged biases on immigration, trans issues and Gaza. It was Grossman who reviewed the offending Panorama programme and Grossman found it wanting. Prescott cited Grossman’s work reviewing BBC output, saying in his dossier: “One of the defences often deployed by the BBC when criticised by external organisations is to claim the evidence presented is mere ‘cherry picking’. This is why David’s reports were so very important: they came from within the BBC and were produced by a very experienced and talented BBC journalist. Yet his findings were still, on the whole, dismissed or ignored, even after EGSC members tried to press home the case for full-blooded action.” Grossman also undertook a review into the work of BBC Arabic and alleged bias there, cited by Prescott in the dossier. Nick Robinson has said of Robbie Gibb: “A majority of the BBC Board appear to agree with their editorial adviser [Prescott] that there is a problem of institutional bias reflected in the coverage of Donald Trump, Gaza/Israel and trans rights. That argument has been led by one board member Sir Robbie Gibb.” As one senior BBC figure put it to me: “I think we all really know that Robbie is behind this latest shitshow don’t we?” (something “friends of Sir Robbie” deny) One thing is for certain, Gibb, Grossman and Prescott appear to enjoy a wide brief to scrutinise all manner of BBC output as they see fit. Something which I know, talking to people at the corporation, has led to great disquiet.

I don’t know Prescott, but I do know Gibb and Grossman. I offer the following experiences as context to the current story and why I believe neither man is well placed to enjoy such power at the BBC, at least without proper scrutiny of their own work. As I’ve recounted before, Gibb has long generated dissatisfaction among BBC staff for ranging beyond his brief and interfering in matters in which he has no business. I was warned by BBC executives that he was “watching you” while I was at the corporation, something which seemed to stem from a tweet exchange of ours before he rejoined the corporation and his dissatisfaction with my work exposing the exams crisis and its effects. It was clear to me he was expressing his views about what I was doing to BBC managers. This was not appropriate as a non-exec member of the board. No-one I asked could think of an equivalent. He also appeared to be involving himself in the appointment of other BBC staff, again in a highly unusual manner (and in my view outrageously).

As for Grossman, while I was at Newsnight, breaking stories, helping lead the programme’s coverage night after night, David, then a long-standing reporter on the show, was often nowhere to be seen. Nonetheless, he did, with no warning, find the time to complain to my editor about my journalism. There was zero attempt to talk to me about any concerns he may have had. Again, a colleague remarked that David was “coming for you.” His first complaint was so ridiculous it was dismissed out of hand. Another concerned a piece on the ideas behind structural racism and another an analysis of the then government’s record on productivity. These were some time apart in transmission- I could conclude only that he had either been watching my output for some time, or had scoured the archives, looking for anything about which to make a complaint. This put my editor in an invidious position. I wanted to speak to him directly, he apparently did not wish to do so, and would not letter the matter rest. In the end, to resolve the situation, my editor felt they had no choice but to refer the matter to the Editorial Complaints Unit, a highly unusual step as they typically deal with audience complaints, not disputes between staff. The ECU, after a long process, finally reported, noting how unusual it all was. They were clearly uncomfortable too. This is the opening paragraph of their report into my work.

“This is an unusual exercise for the ECU. Our published brief is to investigate external complaints about BBC content and pass judgement on whether they have met the standards set out in the BBC Editorial Guidelines. The Complaints Framework, under which we operate, does not preclude BBC staff members from lodging their concerns through the same channels as members of the public, but it is rare and this case is clearly more sensitive still, as it involves two senior members from the same reporting team.”

To aid their report, I had to spend days writing a detailed defence about the two offending items. Grossman, in what struck me as a deeply cowardly move, never spoke to me about these complaints, barely meeting my eyes in the corridor when we did occasionally cross paths. This was a deeply dispiriting period, as you might imagine- and a destabilising one, and formed part of my eventual decision to leave the corporation to go somewhere that I could truly do journalism without fear or favour. It is worth saying that to my knowledge I never had a complaint upheld against me from any viewer about my broadcast work in my time at the BBC, because I took my responsibilities on impartiality seriously, indeed I was meticulous. This spurious nonsense from Grossman wasn’t upheld either. After months, during which I was required to respond point by point to the tune of thousands of words, the ECU came back, and exonerated me completely on the productivity item and to a substantial extent on structural racism, noting a few attribution problems and a couple of datasets being out of date and that “in our view the item required a greater acknowledgement of the limitation of the statistics and the still active debate on the root causes of the disparities shown.” This was fair enough and I myself had already acknowledged this to the ECU, the piece being a late commission, too ambitious and made in too much haste late on in the Newsnight production day, something they themselves accepted. It was the sort of thing which a colleague could have discussed with another in a reasonable fashion and I’d have been the first to say wasn’t my best work- instead Grossman started what felt to me like a completely disproportionate inquisition, a personal witch hunt. It was unfair, but the effect on me was obvious: it made my working life harder, left me feeling delegitimised internally, and hung a cloud over my head. To my surprise, and wry amusement, he was later moved from Newsnight, to his new role, where it seems to be one of his formal jobs, to scrutinise others and do what he did to me in an official capacity, working closely with Gibb. In terms of the complaint against me I do not know whether Gibb was involved— what happened was deeply opaque — but at the time I wondered, as did others at the BBC at the time. With my own experiences, it does not surprise me to find the two men reportedly as part of this story, on a much bigger and important scale. Which is why I’m sharing these experiences now. Given what I know about how they operate, and what is in my view their blinkered view of what impartiality is, I do not think they should stay in their jobs. I have spoken to ex-BBC colleagues who are disturbed by their work. In my experience, and those of many former colleagues – their approach was often one-directional and therefore partial. Based on my own experience, I would not trust either to act properly, fairly or crucially, impartially.

I thought long and hard about Gibb and Grossman at the time and since about what their motivations were, as I say I worked with both and they were at the BBC cumulatively far longer than I was. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they are part of a right wing plot, as such. I genuinely think they think they are saving the BBC from itself. But that is because they suffer from the same affliction as much of the ailing, older British media class, ubiquitous across the lofty, windy diatribes in the pages of the Sunday Times and Telegraph, former BBC anchors and the like: a total lack of self-awareness. They believe their own politics to be neutral, impartial- and other people’s politics to be the aberration, or doctrinaire, a belief egged on by the fact that most of the media agrees with them. Orthodoxies are for other people. Many of these people lecture younger BBC staff as to being too rigid, or subject to groupthink, or unwilling to step outside themselves: it is these people, inside and outside of the BBC who are in my experience most rigid of all, because they are so convinced their politics isn’t really politics, but just some default setting shared with much of the country- when it is not. Worse, they usually claim to do what they do in the name of ordinary working class people about whom they usually know nothing. I’ve written before about impartiality, and that of course, as an individual I wasn’t impartial at the BBC. I had views which I can now more freely express. I had biases- but I actively worked against them in my work, as I was required to do. How many of these people, self appointed guardians of impartiality, actually do the same? They often can’t- in my view because they don’t recognise their inherent partiality in the first place.

The BBC was a place which had shaped my life and political perception. As a child and teenager I gorged on its news programming, giving me a window into a world not mine. It made me want to be a television journalist. You wouldn’t be reading these words without it. I despair at the position it is now in. I have little to no sympathy for Tim Davie. He has helped create the problem by constantly opining on the BBC being too liberal. He has legitimised the critique which has toppled him. He appeased the same forces who have brought him down. He seemed to me to think little about what impartial journalism means in this age of universal deceit. I am also unmoved by some of the complacency the BBC often has when it talks about itself- talking about doing things “only the BBC can do”. This list is much more limited than is often presented as being. I think there is still value to a national broadcaster funded by some kind of national levy- but if the BBC cannot or will not defend itself, and if it will not stand true for a truly radical concept: fearlessly impartial journalism, not fearful management of impartiality, then it will fade away. And it’ll deserve to. In addition, it cannot fight a battle from within, with people with a deeply jaundiced view of what impartiality truly is. Turness and Davie have gone. It is a good moment to clear the decks- at the very least Robbie Gibb- and all political appointees to the BBC, should go with them.