Do Not Adjust Your Set

The BBC debacle may be just the start of a darker turn in British media.

It’s insightful to watch those rushing to defend the institution of the BBC in such gushing and glowing terms. Emily Thornberry leads the pack: “Across the world, the BBC is recognised as the best source of impartial news reporting. It’s not perfect, because nothing made by people ever is. However, in these days of deliberate lies, manipulation & populism, it’s a beacon of truth. Britain should be proud of it.
And we are.”

This is a wholly anglo-centric worldview, not just in terms of how the BBC is seen within the UK but throughout the world. It ignores how the BBC is perceived in Scotland, after 2014, and how it is perceived across the world after its treatment of the Israeli attacks on Palestine [ see CfMM-report-2023-24-ePDF-Edited.pdf]

As I said elsewhere… the collective dissonance required to imagine the BBC as a left-wing propaganda outlet is remarkable [Fake News and the War on the BBC].

But there is a deeper malaise at play here than just the superficial (and obvious) plot by the British Establishment to control the public broadcaster (and their regulator, Ofcom). This is the internationalisation of political hegemony and control. As Jonathon Shafi writes in The National: “For many, the last threads of good will afforded to the BBC were finally shredded in relation to its coverage of the Gaza genocide. But there is a more foundational problem, linked to the disarray at the heart of a once stable and assured establishment.”

“The BBC crisis, in that sense, flows from a wider and deeper disintegration of a status-quo being torn apart by the ideological ruptures precipitated by national decline and the vexed issues of our era. This overlaps with a changing world order, in which the United States is seeking totalising control over the Western hemisphere.”

This may take a darker turn, if, as seems unlikely, the Trump administration succeeds in suing the BBC. Will British taxpayers be asked to stump-up for such a case?

There’s a darker irony here, which is that the British Patriots who moan on (and on) about the Nation, its perceived Greatness and exceptionalism, are doing everything they can to destroy one of the very few institutions of ‘Britishness’ left.

Having set the stage the door is now open for extreme political pressure to be put on the appointments of the replacements for the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness. As Mic Wright writes [Arsonists cosplaying as fire-fighters]: “The BBC will continue to be battered down by its critics on the Right. There is no new Director-General who would be sufficiently right-wing unless their intention was also to tear down the BBC as an organisation. The BBC is the biggest competitor for every other media organisation in the country. It’s the white whale and the way it uses its website makes every national and local newspaper livid.”

If you and control everything, just the existence of the BBC makes you angry.

If you live and breath in a silo-world, where everyone agrees with you and your worldview is perpetuated and re-circulated constantly, its very easy for you to believe that the wild claim that the BBC is some kind of HQ for the wokerati. Your idea of ‘balance’ and ‘impartiality’ is out of whack. This is the world the media moguls and elite live in, and this is their projection onto the BBC.

Now, with the revelations spilling out about how this all came to play (I covered it here On Impartiality, Nepotism and State Broadcasting ) the harsh realities of the players at the heart of the BBC board are on show. In particular the role and background of Robbie Gibb is, at last, coming under some scrutiny. People like Andrew Neil are spitting blood at the fact this is happening at all. When the normally uber-bland Ed Davey tweets: “Robbie Gibb was appointed to the BBC Board by Boris Johnson, was an editorial advisor for GB News, and worked as Theresa May’s Director of Comms. He is not impartial or neutral. The government should remove him from the Board immediately to protect the BBC’s independence” - the blessed Andrew Neil thunders: “Idiotic. Now list all the left-wing appointees to the BBC board over the years. I guess you think they were impartial and neutral. Then give us even a scintilla of evidence to show that R Gibb has ever done anything to undermine the BBC’s impartiality.”

That Neil, who picked up a healthy pay-cheque from the BBC for years, and used his platform to spout his far-right agenda should be shouting about impartiality, is frankly, hilarious.

The political elite have almost total control of the media landscape, they own the press and have made inroads into broadcasting. The BBC is a pitiful wreck, riddled with bias and completely lacking in transparency, oversight or democracy. But it’s still a threat because it has a notional idea of impartiality. This is unacceptable to the powerful.

In 2022 Nesrine Malik, author of We Need New Stories chartered the phenomenon of the failure of what she called the rightwing media ‘swamp’. GB News lost half its value since it launched. Ratings for Piers Morgan’s Talk TV are pitifully low. Malik explains why this is not a triumph:

“The repositioning away from ratings to views, despite the former securing advertising, suggests that the entire model of right-wing TV is adjusting its course from commercial viability to sustainable loss, with the payoff being prominence in the discourse. The bad news is that this model is floundering not because there’s no appetite for inflammatory, opinion-based news. It’s because there’s too much. In fact, the appetite is so huge that it feeds off, and is fed by, the very mainstream media that these channels thought they were differentiating themselves from. The rightwing media swamp isn’t any less fertile. It’s full.”

Malik’s analysis is essentially right; this is a monoculture, “a raging furnace of right-wing provocation, spitting out lies, fear and spite, shaping a political culture of miserliness and insularity”.

It remains to be seen whether, out of this carnage, the very idea of public broadcasting is salvageable. It was always an abstract idea, rather than a reality. But what may emerge from all of this is an even more politicised BBC, an emboldened far-right media landscape, and a stretch of Trumpian influence across the Atlantic. With the neo-fascist agenda of Farage on the horizon, the pieces are being put in place to ease him into power and give all the exposure he needs, and none of the scrutiny he deserves.