Britain’s Biased BBC Needs Saving From Itself
Tim Davie on The One Show with Alex Jones. No longer part of the scenery.
Photographer: Jonathan Brady - PA Images/PA ImagesOne of the oddities of BBC News is that it spends so much time talking about itself — like a snake ingesting its own tail. This time the self-ingestion is justified. On Nov. 9 the British Broadcasting Company’s director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned in a scandal that goes to the heart of its claim to public money: objectivity.
The most serious charge is that it spliced together two distinct parts of a speech by Donald Trump in 2021 to give the impression that he’d told supporters to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” But there are others: That BBC Arabic consistently took the Palestinian side in the Gaza war; that the BBC was too accommodating of trans activists, talking about “pregnant people” rather than women; and, more generally, that BBC News is overwhelmingly slanted toward the opinions of London’s metropolitan elite.