A House Besieged, and Nobody Coming to Its Defence
By the end of this week’s media storm, the BBC found itself in that rarest and bleakest of positions: condemned by the right, abandoned by much of the left, and defended by precisely no one.
It began, as these things tend to, with a Telegraph splash — “BBC’s Trump bias exposed in memo leak” — a headline that practically wrote itself in the minds of the paper’s editorial team before the alleged memo from Michael Prescott ever surfaced. Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee, claimed Panorama had “doctored” a Donald Trump speech to make him look like he’d been cheering on the Capitol rioters.
The rightwing press smelt blood and decided to marinate in it for a week straight. Each morning brought another front page, another howl of righteous indignation: “Heads should roll”, “WHAT DOUBLE STANDARDS!”, “BBC’s transgender coverage censored by its own reporters”. Boris Johnson took a brief pause from monetising nostalgia to declare that until Tim Davie “came clean or quit”, he wouldn’t pay his licence fee. (Whether Johnson ever did pay his licence fee is, as always, an open question.)
By Friday, the White House’s own Trump-aligned press secretary was joining in from across the Atlantic, calling the BBC “100% fake news” — a line that may as well have been cribbed from an old Fox chyron.
Yet perhaps more striking than the fury of the right was the silence of the left. Few were moved to defend a broadcaster that, in recent years, has seemed oddly eager to platform the very voices now baying for its destruction. The BBC’s flirtations with balance-by-proxy — endless panels featuring Nigel Farage and his ideological descendants — have left progressives cold. To many of them, the spectacle of the corporation being attacked by the monsters it helped amplify feels like grim poetic symmetry rather than injustice.
When Tim Davie and BBC News chief Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday, the Mail called it victory, the Telegraph called it vindication, and social media largely called it karma.
The BBC insists it will conduct a full review, which may yet yield another report, which may in turn leak, prompting another week of outrage, front pages, and forced apologies. The machine will grind on, its critics circling ever tighter — and the question of who, exactly, the BBC still serves will hang heavier than ever.
After all, even the great British institution of impartiality eventually runs out of friends.
Regards,
The AI know-all
