‘The BBC crisis and our half-right, half-wrong politics’

The BBC is in crisis – again.

This is not a piece reporting on what has happened. You can’t move for those today. Here’s the BBC’s own explainer.

Fundamentally, mistakes were made at a high profile and politically sensitive organisation that is at once both ‘too big to fail’ and also ‘too big not to make mistakes’. For the BBC we could also read NHS, Home Office or countless other organisations where individual human errors go unchecked and the political and organisational desire to protect the organisation and their leaderships can inevitably lead to an excess of defensiveness rather than an ability to own up to errors quickly and deal with them both in the moment and on a wider organisational level.

Traitor or faithful? We’re all blindly picking sides

What has both fascinated and worried me though is less the story itself but the reaction to it.

As is so often the case many people have picked a ‘side’ and are arguing it voraciously without any attempt to see where those they view as on the ‘other side’ might have a point.

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For many on the left the right wing press hate the BBC therefore this is simply a right wing plot and so I must defend the BBC with my life. For those on the right, the BBC is the pinnacle of the woke/liberal elite/metropolitan capture of our great British institutions and – as such – must be destroyed and/or recaptured.

The difference between those who want it destroyed and those who want it recaptured is instructive. Because it is undeniably true that one of the drivers of the right wing press’s loathing of the BBC is their market share in the decidedly unlucrative sphere of news and more importantly to them the decidedly more lucrative world of entertainment media.

The BBC had a huge win last week in the latter sphere. Millions of us – myself very much included – tuned in to watch the finale of The Traitors, with the BBC dominating the airwaves, the headlines and the national conversation in ways others can only dream of.

Right wing press barons like Rupert Murdoch and his heirs and competitors don’t agree on much but they all agree that this market dominance by the BBC of the national – even international airwaves – is unfair competition. This wouldn’t change if the BBC turned into GB News 2 – in fact it would probably upset the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail more as the corporation would be treading even further onto ‘their’ turf. That’s why they don’t want the BBC to agree with them – they just want to tear it down. If you see everything as a market, then the state having any role in what you consider a purely commercial enterprise will offend your free market sensibilities.

But the left too have complained about the entertainment side of the BBC, seeing it as a trivial waste of resources that might be better spent on news and current affairs. “Who cares about Strictly when there is a war in Gaza/NHS in crisis/People are living in poverty?” has been a perennial question (for pre-Strictly insert Eastenders/Noel’s House Party/The Generation Game or any of a dozen other popular BBC shows. One could even adopt the format of one of my favourite old quiz shows “Who cares about BLANK when there’s BLANK happening in the world….”

Those who want to see it ‘move to the right’ (or rebalance away from being too liberal/left wing as they would see it)  have motivations are less obviously commercial. The question of course then becomes one of several highly contested concepts – balance, impartiality “wokeness”. All issues the BBC grapple with constantly.

Criticism and attack are not the same thing

One question is – of course – what is meant by left and right? The BBC’s economic coverage cleaves pretty closely to the orthodoxy so radicals from Liz Truss to Yanis Varoufakis feel that their views are un- or at least under-represented. But generally, it is not the economic coverage that is considered too ‘woke’ but the coverage of social issues such as immigration, racism and racial representation, the conflict in Gaza and wider foreign policy issues and the ongoing hot chestnut of the tension between trans rights and women’s rights to give a few examples.

These issues are harder to place on a left/right spectrum. There are people on the left who support Isreal and people on the right who celebrate the inclusion of more diverse faces on the telly. The left has torn itself to pieces over the sex vs gender debate before even adding the complication of more traditionally conservative views not just of what a woman is but what their role in society should be. But for shorthand, these culture war issues have been shoehorned into a left/right binary that the BBC is constantly seen as supporting one side or another on. The left think they platform Farage far too often, the right think having same sex pairings on Strictly is political correctness gone mad.

The problem is that some of what is said about the BBC’s internal biases is undeniably true – the largely London or Greater Manchester based staff will skew younger and more liberal and that might well have an effect on workplace culture. But it need not have an effect on BBC output – and across the piece it widely doesn’t. It’s just that when it does these instances are seized on and exagerated as examples of wider failings or ignored and diminished to avoid all criticism.

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When mistakes are inevitably made the corporation becomes brittle and defensive rather than openly inquisitive. Equally, when contentious decision are taken, the BBC never actually takes full throated ownership of them rather than sheepishly and timidly hoping any criticism will go away.

The BBC has felt like it has been in a defensive crouch for well over a decade now – a crouch that has been ruthlessly taken advantage of by those who mean it harm. This defensiveness has done it absolutely no good. It is not a stronger organisation than it was at the turn of the century, its critics have not abated in their fervour for BBC bashing. Neither has it got better at learning lessons from past mistakes and not just apologising but implementing organisation wide learning. All too often, the people who seem to trust the ‘world’s most trusted news source’ the least are the people running it whose second guessing of themselves is visible from space.

A little bit right, a little bit wrong

I believe the BBC’s role is more important than ever. I believe the BBC can and does make mistakes and can and should learn from them. I believe there has been an organised campaign to weaken the corporation and that has included some very unsuitable people being brought into it at board level which further undermines faith in the BBC. I believe that the BBC has sometimes fallen susceptible to group think and internal pressure that more diversity of views would have made it easier to challenge.

There, that wasn’t so hard was it? Yet it seems that in our polarised times, the one thing we all seem to agree on is that the enemy must be given absolutely no quarter – and that we all have a lot of enemies. Not just people with whom we disagree – enemies who we must destroy.

This leads to terribly ways of thinking where we simply cannot allow any nuance in at all. Because to do so would be to allow that those enemies might be a little bit right. Not whollly right. Not right enough to either buy into their argument or solutions wholesale. But right enough to deserve engagement with what they are saying. But I believe we would all be better off if we were able to criticise the things we love and see the value in the things we don’t.

When you are under constant attack, engaging with your critics can be really hard. As can telling those criticising you in good faith from the bad faith actors. But to learn and grow – dammit even to survive this moment of anti-institutionalism – the BBC, the NHS, The Home Office and the government are all going to have to learn to do this better. They will have to understand that defending an institution does not mean denying its mistakes or taking it on a journey of change. They must also understand that appeasing those who wish you hard is not the same as listening to those critics who wish you to be the best you can be.

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Hard work will be needed to rebuild the BBC after this latest crisis. There will be those who hope that can’t happen. The rest of us should engage in good faith with the BBC’s flaws in order to be a part of rebuilding it stronger and proving them wrong.

And if you think there aren’t lessons in any of the above for the government, then I want to be pit against you in the next season of the Traitors…

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