Governments and oppositions have always complained that the BBC is too generous to the other side. In the past, that charge has not been sustainable for long enough to think the corporation is systemically failing at impartiality. Its news output is generally fair and balanced, especially when compared with the frothy partisanship in many newspapers. It is not an organ of state propaganda. That independence is maintained by regulation and internal rules, but neither of those mechanisms is sufficient without a wider political culture that values the BBC on its own terms and does not seek to undermine it.
The current Conservative government is unreliable on that score. Evidence of capitulation to political pressure, reported this week by the Guardian, demonstrates the hazard. Senior editors discouraged the corporation’s news outlets from using the word “lockdown” to describe social restrictions at the start of the pandemic, at Downing Street’s behest. Alternative terms were used instead on the BBC website. Leaked messages show editors passing on one government request that the newsrooms “turn up the scepticism” about Labour’s pandemic response. Others urged generous interpretation of comments by Boris Johnson comparing Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion to Brexit, and congratulated staff for avoiding a story about Mr Johnson’s alleged affair with Jennifer Arcuri.
To what extent reporters adjusted their work to meet every demand is unclear, although some chilling effect is certain. It is also demoralising for staff who take pride in their professional integrity to receive editorial instruction, barely filtered, from the office of the prime minister.
That is a failure to uphold basic standards of impartiality. It also sits curiously with the decision last week, later reversed, to take Gary Lineker off air for tweets criticising government rhetoric towards refugees. Mr Lineker is not a news reporter and his comments were not broadcast on the BBC. It would have been easy for the corporation to dismiss the row as a politically motivated, confected distraction from the real issue – a bill in parliament, the contents of which ended up getting less air time than arguments over the presenter of Match of the Day. It is doubtful this would have happened if Mr Lineker’s comments had been supportive of government policy. Other BBC entertainers have declared pro-Tory views and escaped censure.
It hardly helps that the current BBC chair, Richard Sharp, is compromised as a guarantor of the corporation’s independence. Mr Sharp is a former Tory donor. He was appointed to his current role while also involved in facilitating private loans to help Mr Johnson plug gaps in his chaotic personal finances. That record is incompatible with the requirement of public confidence in impartiality at the top, debilitating the rest of the organisation.
One test that corrects for complacency and self-regard around venerable British institutions is to imagine how the arrangement looks from abroad: the chair of the national broadcaster was the former prime minister’s preferred candidate and also his loan arranger. It should not have happened and, to safeguard the BBC’s reputation, it must be undone.
