The Far Right is winning its war against the BBC

A well-meaning but frightened broadcaster in a long-term nervous breakdown

What do you call an organisation that over the past two decades has seen a string of recent chief executives leave under a cloud? Dysfunctional? The best way I describe the BBC—a broadcaster I have worked for, contribute to, and in which I have many friends and colleagues—is that it is in a permanent nervous breakdown. For as long as I have known it, it has been both a wonder for the world and a mess.

The crisis in which Donald Trump (inevitably) is centre stage is probably its deepest yet. The details are both important and arcane. It boils down to these accusations: that a documentary programme (that wasn’t aired in the United States) defamed the U.S. president by splicing together two parts of a speech to suggest he was inciting violence in the assault on Congress in January 2021. It is habitually anti-Israel, particularly in the news division’s Arabic-language service. Oh, and it’s pro-trans, too. And, generally, “woke”.

In its composition, this latest battle is similar to previous ones. It is characterised by embattled journalists, some editorial errors, frightened management, hapless governance, and forces on the right ranged against it. Some of the BBC’s political adversaries want to frighten it into submission (which they succeeded in doing long ago). Others want to destroy it (work in progress), leaving the field open for more new shock-jock entries such as GB News, the UK equivalent of Fox News. These forces are now turbocharged by MAGA.

The charge invariably made against the BBC is that it fails to be impartial. That term, however, is interpreted in different ways. To Trump’s people and their acolytes in the UK and Europe, this denotes any form of criticism of anything they do that shines a light on falsehoods, conspiracies, or actions that are damaging to democracy. Some are suspicious of the BBC’s recently launched “Verify” department, which attempts—shock, horror—to verify whether something a public figure says is true.

One of the weapons used against mainstream news organisations is to seize on any individual mistake. The fury is selectively applied, however. The Telegraph, whose exclusive report on the BBC’s latest problems fomented this latest crisis, has been forced to issue 114 corrections this year alone. By contrast, the BBC issued 33.

Such details are not dwelt on by the hard right. In the past 18 months, Trump has sued CBS, ABC, the New York Times, even the Wall Street Journal. The two broadcasters rolled over and settled out of court. With the two newspaper groups, the litigation is ongoing; they have vowed to defend themselves.

Seen from his vantage point, it was logical for the president to go after the BBC. There was no downside. It seems unlikely that he had ever heard of the programme concerned, Panorama, which was broadcast in the UK in October 2024, on the eve of the US elections. At the time, the BBC said it had received not a single viewer complaint, though that number has grown in the past few weeks amid the present furore.

Trump will have been advised that the BBC is in no position to push back against him. It is vulnerable on many fronts. Its revenue is based largely on the licence fee, an annual tax on each registered household currently set at £174.50 (around $230). At a time of so many subscription alternatives, many Britons—encouraged by the right—resent paying for it. For many years, the fee has struggled to keep pace with inflation, leading to real-term budget cuts, while non-payment—though still technically a criminal offence—is not being pursued with as much vigour as it used to be. As a result, according to the latest data, released by the BBC itself, one in eight citizens is dodging payment.

Uncertainty is built into the corporation’s DNA. Once every 10 years (sometimes the periods are different), it is required to negotiate with the government a renewal of its operating charter and the license fee level. If the government of the day is annoyed with its coverage, which is often the case—given the amount of output produced, you can always find something that is bothersome—it makes it tougher still.

While one of the mantras of the BBC is that the news division is entirely independent of the business side, it is impossible not to feel the pressure. And, as luck would have it, this negotiation process is set to begin shortly. The Labour government is more sympathetic to the BBC than its Conservative predecessors were. But it, too, has been infuriated by many of the mistakes, and they’ve been not just editorial. There’s been a string of sex-related scandals in recent years and other instances of bad behaviour, many of which appear to have been poorly dealt with by managers.

For Keir Starmer the problem could not have come at a worse time. His grip on power is looking increasingly parlous. Some opinion polls are marking him down as the most unpopular prime minister in living memory—which is saying something after the ruinous antics of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Unnamed allies of Starmer last week briefed journalists about members of his cabinet supposedly plotting against him—a tactic that has backfired—and the annual budget speech at the end of this month is set to be extremely controversial.

Starmer, therefore, is not looking for a fight with Trump, with whom he has bent over backward to stay on relatively good terms. He knows that while Trump hasn’t gone as far as his erstwhile friend Elon Musk in calling for people to take to the streets against the British establishment, many around the president are supporting the far-right Reform party. Its leader, Nigel Farage, frequently schmoozes in Washington.

As with so much of his politics, Starmer is trying to please all sides, satisfying no one. He has defended the BBC’s journalism but avoided asking Trump to withdraw his legal threat, which he has declared he will pursue in earnest.

Morale at the BBC is at rock bottom—and it’s rarely been good. Some of the harm has been self-inflicted. In 2004, its director-general and chairman were forced to quit over a row over the reporting of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the death of a senior scientist; in 2012, its director-general left after barely eight weeks amid accusations that a TV report on years of sex abuse of children by one of its top stars had been dropped. In 2021, a former director-general was criticised for not having properly investigated an interview in the 1990s with Princess Diana, in which the correspondent was accused of duplicity. It doesn’t look good. Then there have been countless sackings and recriminations around showbiz stars abusing their positions.

And yet, day in and day out, the BBC continues to produce some of the best programming—David Attenborough and natural history alongside entertainment shows that are syndicated worldwide. It continues to broadcast news shows on TV and radio that are respected around the world, including some peerless reporting of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and of Israel and Gaza.

One of its many troubles is that, as the money gradually dries up, the more senior correspondents, producers, and editors are either forced out—because they’re more expensive—or they go to places where they feel they have more leeway to be fearless. That leaves a smaller group of beleaguered and inexperienced staff to navigate the incessant storms, often badly supported by middle managers who are desperate just to cling to their jobs and not cause trouble.

In 2005, I wrote a piece for the New Statesman, the magazine I was editing at the time, during another period when it appeared the corporation had lost its nerve in the face of attack. To illustrate the story, we chose an old-fashioned television with spindly legs alongside the BBC logo and the words “Broken, Beaten, Cowed”. It was highly controversial and led to furious management denials and denunciations.

It could have been reproduced during several subsequent crises, and it could be reproduced for our present times, too. Now, however, the road back feels far harder to navigate. That would be a disaster. The BBC is still, despite all this, held in high regard across the globe. And with Russia and China pumping out free-to-view propaganda, unencumbered by financial constraints or the need for honesty, the repercussions of the corporation’s demise would be felt far and wide.

This is an amended version of a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy