In Tim Davie, the BBC may have found a director-general who understands what must be done for the corporation to meet the growing political risks to its future. The greatest obstacles he faces in trying to secure the BBC’s survival will come from within the organisation and its natural friends outside.
Following an independent review of its editorial practices, Davie has committed the BBC to impartiality and robust debate, promising that it will discuss and scrutinise all perspectives on contested issues, without taking sides. The only controversial thing about that should be that it even needs to be said since those are fundamentals of journalism.
Yet it puts the BBC’s editor-in-chief on a collision course with many of his colleagues, who increasingly believe that their own views and values should come before that impartiality. That’s not my account but one given by several BBC editors and reporters. According to one senior executive, a significant number of editorial staff, most but not all young, are reluctant even to quote or broadcast people saying things those staff disagree with, especially on topics such as race and gender.
Meanwhile Bectu, the largest BBC staff union, recently told Davie that the BBC’s commitment to impartiality must not prevent its workers from engaging in “campaigning on issues that are in line with the BBC’s values as an employer”. Never mind that some of the BBC audience might not share those values and therefore wonder whether to trust editorial staff who “campaign” for things they don’t support.
To journalists, campaigning and reporting should be incompatible. The job is to put the facts and their meaning before the audience; you leave your own views at the door.
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An organisation of the BBC’s scale should be able to train its staff out of such unprofessional attitudes, but the non-editorial parts of the corporation often reinforce the notion that the views of staff should take priority over giving the audience a full picture of the country and the world. Some in BBC News see their division as fighting (and often losing) a battle that pits journalistic rigour against those staff “values”. To see where that leads, look at The New York Times, once a bastion of rigour (and often a little dull as a result), but now driven by the views and preferences of its staff, a group who don’t even try to represent the full range of opinions and perspectives found in the nation they cover. The NYT, a commercial entity, can afford to take sides in a divided culture, and even profit from it. The BBC, a public broadcaster, cannot. Davie understands that, even if too many of his colleagues do not.
The forces pushing the BBC down the partisan slope are not just internal, as shown by a remarkable recent row over some significant BBC reporting. Last week the BBC website published a feature in which several lesbians described suffering sexual coercion and worse by male-bodied trans women. In any other context, journalism giving voice to victims of sexual trauma might be applauded but this report unleashed hell, since trans issues sit on the faultline between journalism and values. (That Bectu letter was about staff campaigning for the trans-rights lobby group Stonewall.) Internal protests from BBC staff alleging transphobia continue; some younger BBC journalists have voiced such criticism in public, suggestive of a worrying failure to understand the purpose of journalism.
Those voices were amplified by external activists. More than 10,000 people have signed an open letter to the BBC that does not question the accuracy of those victims’ accounts, but insists that the corporation should still not have reported them because of the upset that doing so might cause some transgender people.
This bizarre campaign is also sending a flood of complaints to the BBC and its regulator, Ofcom, and bolstering the “values” faction within the corporation. To deliver on his good words about fostering debate without fear or favour, Davie will need to stand his ground when that deluge reaches his office.
Likewise in the choice of the BBC’s next political editor. A disgraceful campaign from parts of the online left has smeared the outgoing Laura Kuenssberg as partisan for no reason other than her failure to take sides. The appointment of her successor must not give an inch to that mob; the next political editor should be cut from the same cloth as Kuenssberg.
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The role of online activists shows that Davie’s mission is part of a bigger, counterintuitive story. For decades, it has been conservatives who have posed the greatest threat to the BBC, enraged by its liberal leanings. Today the biggest danger comes from progressives pushing the corporation to lean further, and so tilt further away from a large section of its audience. Davie has recognised that the BBC must not succumb to that pressure, for if it does, those destructive conservative critiques of the BBC will be validated.
I support the BBC. However flawed it is, the country is better off with a public broadcaster than without. Run properly, it should provide a common anchor-point for a society whose elements risk drifting away from one another. Conservatives who rashly dream of its dismantling should recognise that this is one of the few institutions still capable of binding us together as one nation; a culture mediated by Netflix and YouTube will tend towards atomisation and strife.
A progressive state broadcaster that promotes the values of one section of the country to the whole country is not sustainable. An impartial, centrist BBC is. Tim Davie has picked the right fight. I hope he wins.
James Kirkup is director of the Social Market Foundation
Hugo Rifkind is away