![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/BBC-News-logo.png\"){kind=logo}
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nTim Davie, the BBC\u2019s director-general, had little choice other than to quit, and neither did the head of the BBC\u2019s news division, Deborah Turness. In a memo leaked last week to the Telegraph newspaper, Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the broadcaster\u2019s internal standards committee, warned the BBC\u2019s board of a string of politically motivated whoppers in the Beeb\u2019s news coverage. (Mr. Prescott earlier in his career was an editor at the Sunday Times of London, which shares ownership with this newspaper.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We do mean \u201cwhoppers.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same program showed footage of the Proud Boys marching to Capitol Hill after it aired the fake clip from Mr. Trump\u2019s 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\u2014this is an alternate dimension of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The BBC\u2019s coverage of transgender issues came to be controlled by an \u201cLGBTQ desk\u201d within the newsroom that suppressed reporting contrary to liberal orthodoxy. …<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Prescott describes endemic failures in the BBC\u2019s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Its English-language reports were prone to a credulous attitude toward any criticism of Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Left-wing media bias is old hat, and complaints about the BBC date at least to Margaret Thatcher\u2019s day. But this is a parable about the perils of public ownership of the means of producing anything, especially news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The BBC is a \u201cpublic broadcaster\u201d in a way that would shock Americans. Any household that watches live television\u2014even if they never watch the BBC\u2014must pay an annual television tax of \u00a3174.50 called the license fee, or face a fine of \u00a31,000. The tax generates \u00a33.8 billion in annual revenue, despite falling household compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No surprise. They used to be even worse. “It\u2019s a warning to Western democracies not to let the government control news production.” Tim Davie, the BBC\u2019s director-general, had little choice other than to quit, and neither did the head of the BBC\u2019s news division, Deborah Turness. In a memo leaked last week to the Telegraph […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14751"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14753,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14751\/revisions\/14753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}