No surprise. They used to be even worse.
“It’s a warning to Western democracies not to let the government control news production.”
Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, had little choice other than to quit, and neither did the head of the BBC’s news division, Deborah Turness. In a memo leaked last week to the Telegraph newspaper, Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the broadcaster’s internal standards committee, warned the BBC’s board of a string of politically motivated whoppers in the Beeb’s news coverage. (Mr. Prescott earlier in his career was an editor at the Sunday Times of London, which shares ownership with this newspaper.)
We do mean “whoppers.” Mr. Trump is up in arms because an episode of the Panorama television news show last year spliced together two snippets of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that he uttered nearly an hour apart. The point was to suggest to viewers that Mr. Trump had urged supporters to storm the Capitol.
The same program showed footage of the Proud Boys marching to Capitol Hill after it aired the fake clip from Mr. Trump’s speech, creating the impression they had heeded his call to action. But that Proud Boy footage was shot before Mr. Trump started speaking that day. Forget media bias—this is an alternate dimension of reality.
The BBC’s coverage of transgender issues came to be controlled by an “LGBTQ desk” within the newsroom that suppressed reporting contrary to liberal orthodoxy. …
Mr. Prescott describes endemic failures in the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Its English-language reports were prone to a credulous attitude toward any criticism of Israel.
The Arabic-language service appears to have run entirely amok. BBC Arabic failed to translate many stories that might offer a positive perspective on Israel, and it has been forced to correct two stories per week, on average, since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack.
Left-wing media bias is old hat, and complaints about the BBC date at least to Margaret Thatcher’s day. But this is a parable about the perils of public ownership of the means of producing anything, especially news.
The BBC is a “public broadcaster” in a way that would shock Americans. Any household that watches live television—even if they never watch the BBC—must pay an annual television tax of £174.50 called the license fee, or face a fine of £1,000. The tax generates £3.8 billion in annual revenue, despite falling household compliance.
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