The BBC Crisis and the Impossible Institution
Grüezi!
Here’s my early two cents as a former TV news exec and journalism professor.
On 9 November 2025, BBC Director General Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resigned, just six days after The Telegraph published an internal BBC memo documenting serious editorial failures.
It had raised real concerns: a misleadingly edited Trump speech, some flawed statistical analysis, imbalanced trans coverage, troubling standards at BBC Arabic.
The problems are genuine. But the critics are compromised. And the timing – as negotiations begin that will determine BBC funding after 2027 – suggests this is less about editorial standards and more about institutional demolition.
But there’s a deeper problem that both sides miss: the BBC’s structural position makes editorial independence nearly impossible.
1 The Failures Stack Up
Start with what matters: the BBC did make serious mistakes.
Panorama’s October 2024 documentary on Trump spliced together clips from two ends of his long 6 January 2021 speech to create the impression he said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The edit removed fifty plus minutes of intervening material including “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” The elision misled viewers about what Trump said and when he said it.
When Jonathan Munro, BBC’s senior controller of news content, defended it as “normal practice,” he missed the point.
Cutting out “ums and ahs” is one thing. Splicing together soundbites that substantially alter meaning is another.
In the words of Omar Little: “Come at the King, you best not miss.”
BBC Arabic gave hundreds of appearances to contributors with histories of hate-filled social media posts. BBC Verify claimed to show racial discrimination in car insurance using old data. BBC trans coverage systematically excluded oppositional voices.
These aren’t borderline editorial calls. They’re failures that deserve accountability.
And when internal reviews identified these problems, BBC management refused to properly acknowledge them.
2 The Men Behind the Memo
But who is marking the BBC’s homework?
Memo author Michael Prescott – a former political journalist turned PR man – was appointed to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee as an independent adviser. His friend and BBC Board member Robbie Gibb reportedly helped secure his services.
Gibb is a former BBC News exec, turned Downing Street comms chief under Theresa May, and adviser to right-wing talk channel GB News before its launch.
In 2020, he led a group that bought The Jewish Chronicle for £3.5 million. No one knows where the money came from, but everyone saw where the JC went – far to the right. Politics aside, it also struggled with its own editorial crises, and lost several prominent columnists along the way.
Gibb is also the BBC Board’s representative on the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee which judges the BBC’s own impartiality – the committee for which Prescott wrote his memo.
Besides the fact that as a former BBC employee he sits in judgment on his former colleagues, you might think his recent experience an invitation for self-recusal from service on a board judging the BBC’s impartiality on issues like the Middle East.
Gibb’s own BBC Board position tells you something about the incestuous nature of the British establishment:
The governing party’s former spin doctor appointed by that party to sit on the board of the national broadcaster.
Advisers selected through political networks. Arbiters of impartiality with stakes in campaigning media organisations. Internal memos commissioned and somehow leaked to newspapers conducting long-running anti-BBC campaigns – welcome to independent oversight.
3 Asymmetric Warfare at the Institutional Level
The BBC operates under permanent asymmetric threat, but it responds differently to different categories of pressure.
This reflects the structure of power bearing down on the institution. Some groups can marshal donors, leverage political networks, secure board appointments, and sustain media campaigns.
Other critics lack comparable institutional leverage.
With 24/7 multi-platform output across domestic and international services, the BBC produces enough content that well-resourced opponents can almost always find defensible examples of failure.
Every broadcast hour creates potential ammunition.
4 The Corporation’s Careful Cowardice
What looks like corporate cowardice is rational strategy under impossible constraints.
Consider the BBC’s choices when faced with legitimate criticism.
If it acknowledges every criticism it provides ammunition to actors seeking its demolition. It signals weakness during Charter Review negotiations. And it invites escalating demands from its own “captured” oversight mechanisms.
Proactive reform would demonstrate good faith and a commitment to standards. But it is also an acknowledgement of systemic failure, which risks further empowering board members with conflicts of interest, and creates precedents for external control of editorial decisions.
Defending problematic decisions confirms allegations of institutional arrogance. But it maintains some defensive perimeter and doesn’t provide ammunition to enemies.
None of these options are good.
But what critics call “defensiveness” might be the least-bad strategy when all of the alternatives accelerate the institution’s destruction.
This doesn’t excuse the Trump edit or BBC Arabic’s failures.
But it reframes the question: Can an institution under permanent threat from well-resourced critics maintain editorial independence by admitting every mistake during political negotiations when every admission will be weaponised to destroy it?
5 The Fundamental Contradiction
Public service broadcasting rests on a political bargain: guaranteed funding in exchange for editorial independence from government.
This requires the BBC to maintain editorial independence whilst depending on governments for existential funding decisions.
The contradiction has always been there. What’s changed is the sophistication and coordination of the actors exploiting it.
The BBC cannot alienate the government during Charter Review, or ignore board members when oversight mechanisms are captured, or afford to systematically offend concentrated power centres, or rely on public support to counterbalance elite pressure.
Genuine editorial independence under these conditions is structurally impossible.
6 What Both Sides Miss
The Prescott memo documents real failures. It also emerges from a compromised governance system.
Some politicians on the right want to reduce the BBC’s scope, cut funding, or eliminate it entirely. Some genuinely believe in market solutions.
Others want to remove – or cow – a journalistic institution that can occasionally hold power to account.
The last political party to try that was Labour with Alastair Campbell.
The memo is ammunition timed for Charter Review. The failures it documents are real. But they’re being weaponised by actors whose solution isn’t better BBC journalism – it’s no BBC at all, or a BBC too frightened to say or do anything of substance.
BBC presenter Nick Robinson captured it:
“There is a genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes. There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation. Both things are happening at the same time.”
There’s something deeper still: the BBC’s structural vulnerability makes it nearly impossible to thread the needle between acknowledging legitimate failures and empowering opponents pursuing its destruction.
7 The Question Charter Review Will Answer
Can genuinely independent public service broadcasting exist when ”independence” depends on funding from the very power centres it’s meant to scrutinise?
An institution that claims editorial independence whilst dependent on government funding, overseen by political appointees, operating under permanent threat from organised opponents, facing asymmetric consequences for different categories of mistake – cannot realistically maintain genuine independence.
Public service broadcasting wasn’t always a lie. But the conditions that made it work have collapsed.
Elite consensus about institutional legitimacy, relative insulation from coordinated pressure campaigns, less sophisticated exploitation of every editorial mistake – they’ve all gone.
What we’re left with isn’t institutional failure correctable through better governance.
It’s the sinking of a ship of the twentieth century British state, dependent on conditions that no longer really exist.
Charter Review negotiations will determine whether the BBC can linger on – or whether “reform” becomes the language to guide it to the depths.
The Prescott memo is timed for this moment. The failures it documents are real. The critics brandishing those failures are compromised. And the institution they’re attacking operates under structural constraints that make genuine editorial independence all but impossible.
That’s what makes the crisis so intractable: all three conditions coexist, and acknowledging any one of them empowers forces that exploit the others.
And if public service broadcasting slips beneath the airwaves in the UK – where it was invented and most dominant – the model risks disappearing globally.
The world will be watching…
Thanks for reading!
Best
Adrian
Another excellent analysis. I am reminded of the famous quote by Cardinal Richelieu, "give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something in them to hang him." As you point out, with so much content produced by the BBC, its critics have plenty of material to sink it. I can only hope that the government doesn't take the bait.