Troubles Mount for the ‘British Biased Corporation’

By John Fund

Sunday, November 09, 2025

 

Amid the resignation of senior BBC officials, the debate on how to save the broadcaster rages on.

 

Tim Davie, the head of the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News (and, formerly, the president of NBC News, from 2013 to 2017), announced their resignations on Sunday.

 

The reason for their departure was the latest in a series of scandals that has rocked the BBC this year. The Telegraph reported last week on a leaked dossier — compiled by journalist Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines — which revealed that Davie and Turness had been informed last May that a BBC documentary had been edited to make it appear as though Donald Trump had explicitly encouraged the Capitol Hill rioters of January 2021. Prescott accused the corporation of “serious and systemic” bias. He also criticized the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues, as well as the network’s anti-Israel bias evident in the BBC Arabic service. In February, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom had slammed the network for a documentary about Gaza that featured a child narrator who turned out to be the son of a Hamas official.

 

The blowup at the BBC is a big deal. At 103 years, it is the oldest global broadcaster, employing 21,000 people who churn out thousands of hours of programming in many languages. It recently drastically expanded its footprint in the U.S. through a partnership with PBS. Its website attracts more than 60 million monthly visitors from the U.S. It is widely viewed by American viewers as impartial and authoritative.

 

The British know better. Andrew Marr, a former political editor of the BBC, admitted some years ago: “The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias. Not so much a party political bias; it is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.” In the era of woke, the broadcaster’s bias has frequently entered the twilight zone. Just last week, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit found that presenter Martine Croxall had broken its impartiality rules by explaining on-air that the phrase “pregnant people” referred to “women.” Amazingly, the BBC had at first rejected complaints from trans activists by explaining that Croxall’s correction was “done for clarity and was in no way meant to be disrespectful.” In fact, the BBC had said that “we’re satisfied it was duly accurate and impartial, and in line with the BBC’s editorial guidelines.”

 

It won’t surprise anyone that the reaction of most of the media to the BBC’s many lapses has been to adopt Davie’s passive admission that “mistakes have been made” and then to pivot to the coverage of outlets such as the left-wing Guardian, which fears that “the BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack,” and that “with these resignations, it has given in.” If it has, it has taken a long time.

 

Almost 20 years ago, I met the late Vladimir Bukovsky, the former Soviet dissident who spent a decade in the Gulag before being released, in 1976. I asked him how he liked living in Britain. He said he loved it, with the exception of the BBC. He tagged it for being slavishly in favor of the European Union, worshipful of climate change extremists, and opposed to Israel. He said that, in protest, he hadn’t paid his annual license fee in years. “I wanted people to see images of me being handcuffed and dragged into court,” he said, “but instead the BBC retreated quietly,” no doubt leery of making him a martyr.

 

I’ve also met Charles Moore, the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, another refusenik who has taken to the bully pulpit to denounce the British TV license fee. He told me that the proliferation of TV channels makes a mockery of the original justification for the fee: that a government broadcaster must ensure “quality” programming. He points out that New Zealand once had a similar system but scrapped it with few complaints. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK party’s leader, says the BBC faces an existential challenge — regain public trust or risk seeing its gravy train vanish: “This is the BBC’s last chance. If they don’t get this right, there will be vast numbers of people refusing to pay the license fee.”

 

The broadcaster faces another threat. The BBC’s Royal Charter ends in 2027, and its renewal could force it to adopt new approaches, such as subscription pricing, selling advertising, or scaling back its ambitious reach. It would be about time. “Let’s drop this pretence that the BBC somehow represents an Olympian purity to which no other broadcaster can aspire,” says Daniel Hannan, a member of the House of Lords. “Let the Corporation raise its own funds, and then let it pursue whatever news agenda it likes. But, for Heaven’s sake, stop taking our money and using it to traduce our values.”