Has there been a coup at the BBC? Interview w/ Des Freeman

The BBC is in a major crisis after it’s director-general resigned for a doctored edit of a Trump speech: can a public state broadcaster survive in an era of media polarisation?

Des Freeman is a professor of media and communications at Goldsmith, London.

Cross-posted from Counterfire

Has there been a coup? If so, who has led it?

I think there has been a coup at the BBC, but I would argue it’s a self-induced coup, so let me try and explain what I mean. It seems to me this is the culmination of many years of political attacks on the very idea that there should be a public-service media organisation. These attacks have been led by right-wing newspapers and Tory and, more recently, Reform politicians, who have spent a lot of time just trying to weaken the BBC and to turn it into something which is incapable of holding power to account – to the extent that it has ever attempted to do so.

But what I think is different with this particular episode is that there appear to be people inside the BBC board who are likely to have deliberately manoeuvred against the leadership. In particular, we have to wonder about the role of Robbie Gibb, the former director of communications for Theresa May, former owner of the Jewish Chronicle and self-avowed Thatcherite. He’s hardly a reliable friend of public service media and a terrible arbiter of impartiality.

The fact is that it’s pretty unusual to see a director general and a head of news handing in their resignations over one error, no matter how significant it was. After all, Panorama is just one small piece of content in the BBC portfolio but it has regularly been the subject of a lot of controversy. It was Panorama that was pretty crucial in trying to delegitimise Jeremy Corbyn back in 2019 where there were all sorts of misleading edits and omissions in that programme. Despite that, but it was nominated for a BAFTA and no one ever lost their job because of it.

So something is going on with this particular programme – obviously because it criticised Donald Trump. I mean you don’t need to re-edit Trump’s comments to make it appear that he was calling for violence on the 6 January 2021 demonstration in Washington, when there are so many pieces of evidence that show both that Trump has regularly used pro-violence rhetoric and that he did call for people to go on the 6 January demonstration. So there’s no need to do it, but that’s not why they resigned. Instead I think it’s a consequence of the heightening of political tensions at top levels of the corporation to further weaken the BBC as an institution.

It’s self-induced because I think that the BBC’s top executives have, in their actions over the last few years, strengthened the very forces – in the right-wing press in particular – who were putting pressure on them to resign. It’s as if they’ve fed the sharks out there and the sharks have come back to eat them. It’s the BBC leadership which took editorial decisions to amplify the voice of Reform so that it receives a completely disproportionate amount of airtimes compared to its size. You can only think this is because this is the BBC is just trying to pander to Reform at a time when the next review of the BBC’s charter is just about to happen, to try to soften accusations of liberal bias. Fat lot of good that did.

We know that its performance over Gaza has been absolutely horrendous. We’ve got all sorts of documentary evidence from, for example, the Centre for Media Monitoring showing that the BBC‘s coverage has been utterly biased, that all too often, they’ve just amplified pro-Israel perspectives and voices. And we know that there’s huge disquiet inside the BBC and amongst ordinary journalists and technicians about how disgraceful the coverage has been. But of course, none of those complaints led to any resignations. It’s only when you offend a particularly right-wing US president at a time when there is a coordinated effort to weaker even the most pallid semblance of public media, that’s when these resignations happen.

Does the BBC have a liberal metropolitan bias?

Well, it depends who’s asking the question because if it’s Nigel Farage, then most of the UK will seem liberal to him because most of the UK is to the left of his hard-right politics. What’s much more important is not a problem with ‘wokeness’ or liberal bias in the BBC but that, and this applies particularly to its senior staff, they don’t reflect the diversity of the British population. So you have, for example, 38% of BBC senior executives privately educated; 26% of them went to Oxbridge. And it’s also an organisation that is highly centralised in places like London and Manchester.

What it’s never really been able to do is to devolve its power, either to the different nations of the UK or to local communities. So there is a cultural problem with the BBC but it’s not the wokeness that Farage and other Reform people talk about. It’s the fact that senior BBC staff are drawn from this narrow clique of people and that they don’t reflect working-class life in the UK.

Why is the right out to get the BBC?

This is a really interesting question because I think for many people, it seems as if the BBC couldn’t do more to pander to right-wing opinions. If you just look at the news coverage of things like business and the economy, industrial disputes, and of course, if you look in particular at its coverage of foreign affairs, then it feels like there is already a right-wing bias in terms of positioning itself firmly with a pro-NATO, pro-imperial view of the world. Far from being anti-business, it’s more likely to be anti-redistribution, against any politicians like Jeremy Corbyn who challenge the status quo. Presumably, we will see the same with Mamdani as New York mayor.

So you think, what more do the right want from the BBC? They had, until very recently, a director general who was a Tory and certainly not the first one at that level. There is a board which is hardly packed with liberals. What more do they want?

I think that there’s an important difference to bear in mind which is that while the BBC certainly reproduces small ‘c’ conservative opinion, above all what it reproduces are the opinions of the government of the day. It takes as its starting point established positions that reflect the political centre ground – a centre ground that has shifted to the right in recent years – but there is a difference between that and amplifying the voices of the hard right and of right-wing newspaper columnists, for whom those positions aren’t enough. For these people, unless you have a BBC that absolutely refuses to feature any coverage of famine in Gaza and refuses to feature any pro-Palestine views, no matter how inconsistently, slightly, then they will object. And so the BBC, along with most other news organisations apart from GB News, probably wouldn’t satisfy them; they are always out to get more, to squeeze more. The right want to reshape the world in its own image and it’s far more comfortable with outlets owned either by billionaire media moguls or tech oligarchs than with organisations formally accountable to and owned by the public.

So, at one level, the very principle of the BBC as a public organisation is, for the more fundamentalist market advocates, unacceptable and therefore there’s always, been a political project to delegitimise and to weaken the BBC. That may seem a bit illogical, when you have a BBC that has so consistently delegitimised and disappointed the left and marginalised left-wing positions. But that doesn’t mean this will be sufficient for the right in the context of the ascendancy of a hard right, epitomised by Trump in the US, who is engaged in his own war not just with public media, but of course, with any media organisation that doesn’t toe the line. That context means that there are forces inside Britain, and as I’ve said, both in right-wing newspapers but also on the BBC board itself, who are seeking either to weaken the BBC or to turn it into an instrument for their own purposes.

Will the BBC survive?

I don’t know the answer to that question and I don’t think anybody can know for sure. At a technological and economic level, things are, of course, really hard for public service media organisations like the BBC who have a remit to do things a bit differently to streamers and wholly commercial organisations. As I’ve already said, the BBC isn’t owned by cash-rich tech giants and isn’t allowed to simply chase the wealthiest or the most lucrative audiences and to just produce content on the genres that are most profitable.

Economically, it’s very hard for them to keep up with the very deep pockets of commercial competitors and big tech who are themselves always subjects to all sorts of consolidation by people with even deeper pockets. The BBC has reacted to technological innovation with things like iPlayer but technological developments, along with the splintering of mass audiences, is going to make it harder to justify a universal license fee such as the one we have now. People can just say that because there is more and more choice delivered through a range of platforms, what is the point of having a public service broadcaster?

The fact is that the BBC is pretty rubbish at defending itself in the context of these challenging times. It says there has never been a greater need for a trusted voice in terms of news when you have the levels of political polarisation we have now. So the best counter to disinformation, say its supporters, is the BBC. Well, that’s quite a difficult position to sustain when they have just apologised for re-editing the comments of the US President. And for many people in the pro-Palestine movement, it’s a bit rich to hear the BBC saying that they are the bulwark against disinformation when it feels like all we had is disinformation, the privileging of Israeli perspectives and the delegitimisation of Palestinian ones. The BBC has hardly appeared as the beacon of truth.

Does that mean the BBC is going to disappear? Well, I suspect not, not least because I think the BBC, as an institution, provides a great service for the British state as a whole. The British state founded it. The British state, just over 100 years ago, took the decision of whether it should copy what was going on in the US and have a commercial system and just leave it to the market. The state specifically chose not to do this. It thought it would be more politically effective to have an organisation, which is at arm’s length from the state, but which can be relied upon to support the state at critical moments, such as the 1926 General Strike, which we will be celebrating next year, and right up to all sorts of geopolitical positions with which the BBC is broadly sympathetic to this day.

Of course, there are all sorts of tensions and of course, the BBC is at times more willing to test and challenge a government, particularly if that government is very weak and vulnerable itself, in which case the BBC can act as a kind of discussion forum for broader debates inside the ruling class. It is ultimately, I think, a useful instrument for generating political consensus in changing times. And as such, I think it retains its utility for the ruling class. Whether that is sufficient to ensure its future. Well, I don’t know for sure but I guess that the success of Celebrity Traitors may help a little.

What should the left do about all of this?

Well, I think the first thing to say is that we’re not disinterested in the fate of the BBC. Not at all. We’re not disinterested by the impact of Donald Trump; we’re not disinterested in what happens with Reform and with Nigel Farage and other voices, including pro-Israeli ones, seeking further to destabilise the BBC as part of a mission to weaken any resistance to reactionary forces. We’re not indifferent to what any of this.

So for example, I think we should be demanding the immediate removal of Robbie Gibb from the BBC Board and the democratisation of the editorial complaints process so that it isn’t shaped by shadowy PR figures as it is now. We must refuse to pay any licence fee money to Trump, as he is now demanding. We need to take government out of the appointments process and to think about whole new ways of running the BBC as an organisation accountable to the public and not to the state or right-wing newspapers. Why not turn the BBC into a public body along lines suggested by the Media Reform Coalition?

But just because we shouldn’t stand on the sidelines, the left shouldn’t be focussed on some kind of abstract liberal defence of the BBC. We can’t drop our criticisms of the BBC simply because of the kind of political attacks that have come from the right. Even though it seems like a coup has been launched against the BBC, and even if the immediate victims of that coup happened to be a Tory director general, that doesn’t mean we just put aside all our justified criticisms of the BBC. Because this is an organisation that does not reflect the diversity of the UK, and that has played, by and large, the role of reproducing a political consensus which works for the British state. You can’t just wish these things away in case things might get even worse.

I’ve often said that in order to defend the BBC and public service media more generally, you absolutely have to acknowledge all of these structural and behavioural problems, because otherwise, frankly, why is anyone going to bother to defend it if they feel excluded? And we know that people really are feeling excluded. We know that levels of any distrust with the BBC rise in proportion to whether you are minority ethnic, if you live in the nations and regions, and for religious minorities; there are many people who feel the BBC hasn’t done the job for them, and there’s no reason why they should simply just defend it. I mean nearly 50% of people between 18 and 34 already don’t feel that the BBC is independent of government – and that’s from BBC research! So I think there needs to be an honest critique of the BBC’s flaws.

But, crucially, the left has to be all the more focussed on combatting the forces of the far right at the same time as criticising those centrist institutions that haven’t performed that role. So we’re going to criticise them for their lack of backbone in standing up to the right and, in the case of the BBC, for actually amplifying those ideas.

And the other thing that the left should be doing is building our own socialist media platforms. One of the things that’s happened now, quite understandably, is that  people often just see polarisation as a problem and dream of a consensus that never used to reflect the interests of most of the population.

Now we have the means to bypass the old media and to produce media of our own which can reach large audiences. I think the pro-Palestine movement is in debt to the Palestinian journalists who use a variety of platforms, including TikTok and Instagram and everything else to make sure that the genocide was to a certain extent live streamed. And major broadcasters eventually caught up a little; well, it took two years for them to do that. I think it’s crucial for the left to build up its media as something that’s completely different to the model of commercial media and public-service media.

So those are the lessons for me. We’re not indifferent to what’s happening at the BBC. We obviously don’t welcome Trump and his allies crushing any opposition inside the media and we need to stand with the media workers wherever they are to organise against this. But the best way of dealing with that is to build the strongest movements against the right and the strongest movements in support of Palestine and, as part of that, to extend the influence of our own socialist media projects.

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