There is always the straw that breaks the camel’s back and in the case of the BBC it was an appalling piece of journalism that spliced together quotes from a speech by an American president to suggest he said something which he did not. Some in the BBC will find a silver lining in the current grey cloud that hangs over the corporation because that final straw - which led to the resignation of the Director General and Head of News - involves Donald Trump who is not hugely popular amongst the British public and I assume deeply unpopular within the BBC.
By framing this as a left/right political row, the BBC is seeking to avoid the truth which is that it is has failed to be impartial on a range of issues where the world view of its journalists is out of step with that of the public as a whole. The last thing I am going to do is to dip a toe into the controversial mires of trans rights or Gaza, but for more than a decade the Alliance has been challenging the BBC’s approach to rural issues and has met a brick wall of denial.
In 2014, a BBC Trust Review into coverage of rural issues, chaired by Heather Hancock, found that there was a "gulf in understanding between the BBC and a significant section of the rural community" and that the BBC had a "metropolitan bias". Yet BBC presenters continued to promote deeply partial and sometimes offensive agendas attacking the rural community.
In 2015, Chris Packham - presenter of the BBC’s Springwatch and Autumnwatch amongst many other programmes - wrote an article in BBC Wildlife Magazine branding farmers and rural people as “the nasty brigade”. The Alliance pursued this blatant breach of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines through its deliberately byzantine complaints process for a year at which point the BBC Trust decided that the BBC’s rules did not apply that Mr Packham as he was not a “regular BBC presenter”, despite the fact that he regularly presented programmes on the BBC.
That ridiculous whitewashing exercise only underlined the strength of the metropolitan bias in many parts of the BBC. It also sent out a message to BBC presenters who are so minded, that they were free to use the status awarded to them by their work for our publicly funded broadcaster to attack rural people.
Then in 2020, the BBC appointed a new Director General, Tim Davie, who in one of his first speeches to journalists said: “If you want to be an opinionated columnist or a partisan campaigner on social media then that is a valid choice, but you should not be working at the BBC” and added that “we urgently need to champion and recommit to impartiality”. You will not be surprised, however, that presenters who worked at the BBC continued to be partisan campaigners against rural interests with absolutely no sanction.
To add insult to injury, last year the BBC aired a documentary on the badger cull produced and presented by Sir Brian May an outspoken (and fairly unhinged) opponent of the cull. I wrote to Tim Davie at the time pointing out that the decision to commission the documentary was “fundamentally incompatible with the BBC's obligation to be impartial”. Of course I received no reply.
Change will now come at the top of the BBC, but it is still very unclear whether there will be any real attempt to change the culture that has led to the current crisis. Worryingly, there does not seem to be widespread acceptance inside the BBC of the institutional bias on rural and other issues that is so obvious from the outside.