GB News viewing figures overtake BBC for the first time - "GB News has overtaken the BBC as Britain’s most watched news channel for the first time."
No, Nick Robinson, this is not a matter of Right and Left. It is right and wrong - "I suppose working for the Telegraph makes me a minor cog in the dastardly plot to destroy the BBC and force its bosses out. However, I’d like to say a few words before sentence is finally pronounced. A self-selecting group of DG-defenders have set themselves up as judge and jury over Tim Davie’s resignation and are determined to inflict as much abuse on those they reckon forced him out. It’s all the Telegraph’s fault, say even those who should know better. But after 25 years as a Telegraph journalist, I find it very odd that what the apologists refuse to accept is that this is not a matter of Right or Left. Instead it should be about our public broadcaster avoiding bias when reporting the facts and also – incredibly, in the mind of most people – it is about not doctoring or tampering with a speech by the president of the United States. There… that’s not too difficult, now is it? That’s the basic rule, as well as apologising when you’re found out. But Davie’s friends are trying to muddy the waters by claiming that his resignation has been engineered by a wicked conspiracy of ardent Right-wingers to inflict their extreme views on this much loved and comfy Auntie."
Apologies mean nothing when the BBC is so obviously unrepentant - "At a stroke, the BBC has apparently substantiated all the claims that Donald Trump has made about the mainstream media’s plot to undermine his presidency. What the BBC has done seems to cast doubt on the veracity and the motives of everyone who believes that there are grounds for discrediting him. For those of us who believe that it is not necessary to tell lies or invent fictional narratives to make Trump appear disreputable, this is infuriating. Let’s call it what it is. It was not a “mistake”: that is, not an accident of slipshod reporting or editing, like a misspelt name or an incorrect date. It was a professionally crafted editing job which has to have been designed to produce a calculated effect for a political purpose. Could the smooth conjoining of two filmed quotes which actually took place nearly an hour apart possibly have been an innocent coincidence? It seems more like Stalinist level fakery with modern technology expertise. But the BBC, even as its top executives throw themselves under the bus, is unrepentant. It – and its army of friends who have been quickly mobilised – are already steering the coverage of this scandal in the way that suits them. This is all, it is being suggested, a Right-wing conspiracy. Those who exposed the story (this newspaper) and those who have leapt upon it, are simply engaged in a campaign to abolish a sacred institution: the nation’s only repository of honest, disinterested news coverage which, by its publicly-owned nature, sets a moral example to the private press whose coverage is dictated by partisan interests."
BBC in crisis as Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resign - "Both Mr Davie and Mr Shah were warned of the doctored footage in May but did nothing until it was exposed by The Telegraph. The decision to issue an apology raised questions about why it took six months to admit viewers were misled... The Corporation also admitted failings after broadcasting chants of “death to the IDF” by the punk singer Bobby Vylan at Glastonbury festival in June. While the BBC did not believe the set it had aired was at risk of inciting violence, it upheld complaints that broadcasting the gig breached guidelines covering harm and offence. Mr Davie has also been criticised for allegedly “fobbing off” the family at the heart of the Huw Edwards scandal and faced questions over the BBC’s handling of allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Gregg Wallace, the MasterChef presenter... John Whittingdale, a Tory former culture secretary, said the way the BBC handled the Prescott report revealed deep-seated failings within the corporation. “The BBC should have said they would take this very seriously as soon as they saw it. They should have said: ‘We are going to have a full examination of all these claims and if we have got it wrong, we will publicly say so and act to put it right,’” he told The Telegraph. “None of those things seem to have happened, which in my view is as serious a failing as the original editorial flaws themselves.” Michelle Donelan, one of his successors, told The Telegraph that simply changing the personnel was not enough. “It is time they wake up, smell the coffee and finally admit it is ingrained in the organisation. Real change will require a culture shift and acceptance of the problem throughout the organisation, not just at the top,” she said."
Tim Davie was right to resign from the BBC. Now the house-cleaning must begin in earnest - "the BBC Arabic service has been required to correct reports on Gaza on an almost weekly basis despite having already been forced to apologise previously for misleading and tendentious broadcasts"
BBC forced to correct two Gaza stories a week - "BBC Arabic has had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate or misleading... One of its complaints involved a BBC Arabic report in January this year about the treatment of hostages by the Al-Qassam Brigade, in which the Hamas unit was described as “guarding” the hostages and being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive. BBC Arabic – which is part of the World Service and is funded mainly through the licence fee – has also been forced to make more than 40 corrections after Camera complained about stories that incorrectly referred to communities inside Israel’s internationally recognised territory as “settlements” and their residents as “settlers”. Responding to the figures, Baroness Deech, a former BBC governor, said the broadcaster’s own Executive Complaint Unit (ECU) has failed in its obligation as an internal standards watchdog. She said: “While BBC Arabic rightly continues to receive condemnation from politicians from all sides of the House for its repeated breaches of BBC guidelines and its flagrant anti-Israel bias, the BBC’s ECU considers it to be entirely blameless. “The ECU is turning a blind eye to bias within BBC Arabic. We need an independent complaints process because the BBC simply cannot be trusted to mark its own homework.”... Among the examples of bias highlighted by both Camera and Mr Prescott were the differences in stories about an attack by Hamas on Oct 1 2024 that killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa. While the BBC News English version reported how the civilians were killed on a train and railway platform, the BBC Arabic version presented the attack as a military operation with no mention of the civilian victims... It also featured two female Israeli hostages “thanking” their captors for the “good treatment” they received while “in custody”. Following a complaint from Camera that the video omitted the “horrific reality of the torture and execution of hostages”, BBC Arabic was forced to amend its story. It removed the section that claimed the hostages had received good treatment and added a brief reference to Hamas abuse. However the BBC, in its statement, defended the video for being “duly accurate” and containing “due context”... Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservatives, wrote to Mr Davie in February this year to complain about BBC Arabic’s coverage, describing it as a “platform for terrorists” that was promoting “appalling anti-Semitism” to millions of viewers. BBC Arabic had previously given a platform to journalists who had made extreme anti-Semitic comments. Ahmed Qannan, a regular BBC Arabic contributor, described a Palestinian who killed four Israeli civilians and a police officer in March 2022 as a “hero”. When a friend of his posted on Facebook “we want to see some throats cut” in response to a shooting near a Jerusalem synagogue, which claimed the lives of seven civilians on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2023, Mr Qannan replied: “Don’t give up on your ambition.” The BBC’s internal review found he had appeared on BBC Arabic 217 times in the 14 months to April 2025. Ahmed Alagha, who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils”, appeared on BBC Arabic 522 times between November 2023 and April 2025, the BBC’s internal review found... “You would think having to issue so many corrections would raise red flags that there was a problem, but Tim Davie has failed to sort it out. Global news director Jonathan Munro refuses to accept anything is wrong. “In fact, he said BBC Arabic’s reporters are an ‘unrivalled source of knowledge and editorial content for the wider BBC’. This is deeply concerning and speaks volumes about the BBC’s failings during the Israel-Hamas war. “The blame lies at the door of BBC executives in London who are only interested in protecting their reputations. The BBC must finally act to stop the rot.”"
How to fix the broken BBC - "what has the corporation’s response been to the Prescott dossier? So far, nothing much. Prescott says that when he presented his findings, senior BBC news executives were “defensive”, and “failed to acknowledge there was even an issue”. Furthermore, in the Trump documentary, there had been “no attempt to mislead” and it was “normal practice to edit speeches into short-form clips”. Funnily enough, I do actually believe that last phrase – this kind of dishonesty has been “normal practice” for decades. Trump is certainly not the first victim of unscrupulous BBC journalism, but the great value of Prescott’s dossier is that it highlights a particular instance of hostility to the US president which is illustrative of an ingrained bias against him ever since he appeared on the scene in 2016... The most pressing problem is how to fund the BBC in the future. The licence fee is becoming visibly obsolete because so many people are refusing to pay. These refuseniks are either those who are fed up with the BBC’s political bias, or (often younger) people who don’t use BBC services much, and don’t see why they should pay a tax to keep it alive... I know from readers about the genuine loathing many feel for an organisation they no longer trust. For them, nothing short of abolition will do. I’m sorry to disappoint, but that’s not going to happen, certainly not under Labour which has an umbilical tie to the corporation. Both entities share a progressive worldview which is anti-Western, anti-capitalist and woke. As it happens, I don’t think abolition would happen under the Tories either. One of the strongest things the BBC still has going for it is that it acts as “a broadcaster of last resort”. Though it irritates BBC people greatly if you label the corporation a “state broadcaster”, that is, in effect, what it is. For instance when Covid struck, the BBC handed over its airwaves, lock, stock and microphone to the Government. For weeks, the government line went completely unchallenged, and no dissent was tolerated. Any government, of whatever stripe, is going to think twice about foregoing a priceless propaganda platform like that. Who knows when you might need one? So what is to be done? Is there any way of rescuing an organisation which is now openly derided as a tax-funded purveyor of fake news? It would help if the BBC was radically slimmed-down. Currently, it is too big – a sprawling empire which tries to do too much. A smaller operation might help to focus minds on the essentials, the first of which is to restore the good name of BBC journalism. Tim Davie arrived in the job in 2020 saying impartiality was his priority. I think we can now say the idea that the BBC can reform itself internally has been tested to destruction. We need a tougher approach. All the scandals the BBC has faced in recent years have been handled in house... Penalties, if any, have been lenient. Giving Ofcom oversight of the BBC was supposed to remedy that, but the regulator (where so many ex-BBC people have had second careers) has also proved limp-wristed . What is needed is a new, truly independent body composed of hard-headed journalists from outside who are not compromised by allegiance to the BBC."
The BBC must root out its institutional bias - "Under its charter, BBC news coverage must be impartial; so this document raises serious questions about the culture inside the corporation where so many subscribe to an anti-Right agenda. The report claims that senior executives and the BBC’s chairman ignored and dismissed a string of serious complaints raised by the watchdog."
The cope is that reality has a liberal bias, so if the media is biased towards the left, there's nothing wrong
This is a crisis point for the BBC. Its gaslighting of Jews must end - "BBC executives in public, in parliament and in private dialogue with British Jews have repeatedly said that there was no systemic problem with the service and that BBC Arabic was “an exceptional source of journalism” and its reporters were an “unrivalled source of knowledge and editorial content for the wider BBC”. This is the definition of gaslighting: presenting a reality which you know not to be true. In this case BBC executives knew it was not true because they had themselves been presented with detailed evidence by a report prepared by their own organisation. Yet BBC executives continued to present the Jewish community with a very different story. BBC executives did this to a small minority community facing a huge and frightening rise in racist attacks. It is utterly shameful."
The future of the BBC is now in doubt - "It gambled everything on the proposal that, for all its faults, the BBC remains as honest and impartial as it seemed in the 1950s. Hence the investment in BBC Verify; hence those irritating adverts with Clive Myrie talking about exposing fake news as if he’s Roger Cook battering on the door of a fly-tipper in Cheadle. BBC Verify’s official mission is to “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake” in order “to bring clarity on complex issues.” The hidden implication was always that commercial media platforms have surrendered to subjectivity – that, okay, you might be free to consume facts from, say, Fox or MSNBC, but you can’t really trust them. That’s the difference Auntie makes; the license fee purchases independence. But now, of course, we know that one of the BBC’s flagship programmes outright lied. That it did not “clarify” the Trump controversy but added to the swamp of assumption, myth and conspiracy-thinking – in which case, why would we trust its Verify service?... If the BBC difference is its impartiality, then that difference is suddenly contested. This not only makes it harder even for left-wing politicians to justify the licence fee: if they cut the cord and let the BBC move to a subscription model, who would now purchase it? The tragedy of the BBC is that many years ago, it enjoyed high ratings, a strong reputation and, believe it or not, was ahead in the technological field: it could’ve easily moved to subscription via the iPlayer and taken a vast share of the British audience to it. By clinging to the licence fee model, however, it has whittled away that faith while delaying the inevitable, allowing competitors to outstrip it. It is the classic example of a state-supported company that, protected from genuine competition, rides out change while its market share dwindles. All this could be sad had BBC executives not been so arrogant about their product, functioning as a welfare programme for middle-class graduates in an organisation that outwardly promotes diversity yet inwardly resembles a feudal hierarchy of luvvies... The Panorama-caught-lying scandal is as embarrassing, and enjoyable, as the discovery that a puritanical pastor is an alcoholic gambler with a Catholic mistress."
Nandy criticises BBC’s ‘inconsistent’ reporting standards - "The Culture Secretary has attacked the BBC’s “entirely inconsistent” reporting standards amid the bias scandal engulfing the broadcaster. On Sunday, Lisa Nandy claimed the BBC’s editorial decisions were not always “well thought through” and fell short of the “highest” expectations."
When I last saw Tim Davie he was furious at The Telegraph - "Three weeks ago, I bumped into Tim Davie. It wasn’t a warm encounter. We were at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where Mr Davie was preparing to appear on stage. It is unusual to have a speaker at a book festival who isn’t promoting a book, so I said hello and asked why he was there. “Why shouldn’t I be?” he replied, in the aggressively defensive tone that Mr Davie reserves for media organisations which cast a critical eye over the BBC’s operations. After justifying his presence with a brief preamble about his love of literature – he studied English at Cambridge and has a particular interest in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett – Mr Davie moved on to a subject about which he has harangued me in the past: The Telegraph. He did not approve of our coverage of the corporation. Moreover, he felt personally aggrieved by it and unhappy about stories I had written. I revealed in the summer that Mr Davie was not only present at Glastonbury on the day that Bob Vylan made his incendiary “Death, death to the IDF” chant, but had been informed of it by staff on the ground. His failure to take decisive action by ordering the live stream to be pulled led the BBC into yet another crisis. He was angered by this and by other stories about the BBC which have piled up in the past 12 months. The criticism, in his mind, was unwarranted and politically motivated. He did not seem to grasp that The Telegraph scrutinises the BBC because it is a public service broadcaster funded by licence fee payers. According to insiders, Mr Davie’s initial reaction to the stories broken by my colleague Gordon Rayner last week was to dismiss them as a fuss about nothing. The Telegraph was out to get him, he believed. This blinkered approach was to be his undoing because he failed to understand that his continued silence on the Panorama broadcast, anti-Semitism and the trans row meant that his position was becoming untenable. That literary festival, it turned out, was Mr Davie’s last public appearance. The audience was modest in size but supportive of the BBC – when the discussion turned to the regularity with which Nigel Farage appears on BBC programmes, the audience was asked to give a show of hands from Reform voters. Not a single hand went up in a room of about 300 people. This was illustrative of the bubble in which the BBC operates, coming face-to-face only with people who share its liberal world view. In his interview on stage, Mr Davie defended the BBC’s record on impartiality and banged the drum for its news division. He also laughed off a question about how much longer he would stay in the job, although admitted that he was under a lot of pressure."
BBC executive who defended Trump Panorama video keeps job - "A senior BBC executive who defended the corporation’s decision to doctor a speech by Donald Trump is under growing pressure to quit. Jonathan Munro, the global director of BBC News, insisted that edits made by Panorama were “normal practice” when internal concerns were raised that they had wrongly made it seem as if the US president was inciting violence... Mr Munro is an executive who has shown a remarkable capacity for clinging to his job despite his involvement in a string of controversies. He was head of newsgathering when the BBC sent a helicopter to fly over the home of Sir Cliff Richard as it was being raided by police. The singer successfully sued the corporation for invading his privacy. Mr Munro also supported the rehiring of Martin Bashir years after the Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, despite knowing that Bashir had secured the broadcast with the use of faked documents. As Ms Turness’s second-in-command, Mr Munro has also been a cheerleader for BBC Verify, the broadcaster’s much-derided service which claims to separate fact from fiction and spin. The insider added: “He should have gone after the Cliff Richard debacle but somehow he’s Teflon-coated.” The immediate problem, another source said, is that BBC News will be left rudderless if its top two leaders depart at the same time... Mr Munro rejected all criticism, asserting that the editing of Mr Trump’s speech was fair while defending BBC Arabic as a source of “exceptional journalism”... Mr Munro said of the edit of Mr Trump’s words: “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short-form clips.” On separate accusations of anti-Israel bias at BBC Arabic, Mr Munro said: “While no service is perfect and all of us can make mistakes, we believe BBC Arabic delivers against [its] responsibilities with the vast majority of its reporting and analysis,” while its reporters are “an unrivalled source of knowledge”. Mr Munro is also said to have expressed pride that an audience survey found BBC Arabic to be almost as trusted as Al Jazeera. Mr Prescott asked: “Is Al Jazeera the new gold standard the BBC wants to aspire to?” Mr Prescott concluded in his memo that he had been surprised by “just how defensive” Mr Munro and Ms Turness were when issues were raised... The biggest stain on his career was his involvement in the decision to film a police raid on the Berkshire home of Sir Cliff in 2014, which was undertaken as part of the Operation Yewtree investigation into historic sexual abuse allegations. Sir Cliff denied the allegations and prosecutors later announced he would face no charges. The story was “red-flagged” to Mr Munro two weeks before the raid and he crowed in an email about having “a nailed-on exclusive”. Sir Cliff sued the corporation and won, to the tune of £2m. During the High Court case, Mr Munro said he had no concerns about airing the helicopter images. Sir Cliff’s barrister, Justin Rushbrooke, a QC at the time, told Mr Munro: “If that is your genuine belief, I suggest to you that you are unfit for your job.” In 2016, the BBC hired Bashir as religious affairs correspondent, promoting him to religion editor two years later. The appointment process came under scrutiny in 2021 when it emerged that Bashir had deceived Earl Spencer into introducing him to the Princess using fake bank statements. Bashir was invited to apply by James Harding, then director of news, who accepted ultimate responsibility for the appointment. At the time, Bashir had left two US jobs in disgrace: he was suspended by ABC for making “crude and sexist” comments during an after-dinner speech, and resigned from MSNBC after making derogatory comments about Sarah Palin. An internal inquiry found that Mr Munro knew that Bashir had faked documents but considered that the allegations were “spent”. He also dismissed the sexist comments, made at a dinner for the Asian American Journalists Association convention, as a “misjudged joke”. Among other things, Bashir spoke about being “happy to be in the midst of so many Asian babes” and said he was relieved “that the podium covers me from the waist down”."
Time to bash the Daily Mail for paparazzi tactics. The BBC would never do that
BBC bias: Is Nick Robinson’s furious blame-shifting a confession of guilt? - "A key part of the story was Prescott’s complaint that BBC executives had minimised these problems. This was little noticed by Today. It played down the fact that the investigations were commissioned by the BBC, not ill-informed external criticism. It also ignored, as did the later public letter from the chairman Samir Shah, the vital point that the flawed coverage consistently reflected certain political prejudices, rather than being mere individual “mistakes”. Instead, Nick Robinson, the Today presenter, was twice allowed to give long introductions in which he tried to make the whole thing turn on the response of President Trump. This allowed him to imply that a feeble BBC board (“part-timers”, he said, as if most members of most boards are not part-time) had failed to stand up to a Right-wing bully, whereas BBC journalists spoke truth to power. He made much less prominent mention of the much more extensive and atrocious Gaza material. The reality is that the BBC has repeatedly spoken untruth to listeners. Robinson preferred to float the idea of a “coup” against BBC executives by some board members and dark Right-wing forces. Before I came on air, Robinson described me as a Conservative peer, assisting this impression of a political agenda. In fact, I am a non-affiliated peer. He ended his first “urbi et orbi” speech by pointing out that at the time of the BBC’s misleading Trump splicing, no one had complained. This surely proves the opposite of what Robinson seems to think. It suggests that because the BBC is traditionally the most trusted source of news, Panorama viewers were inclined to take it at face value. In fact, that face value was false. Trust had been betrayed. If the BBC were committed to impartiality, it would have behaved humbly, setting out the detail and the gravamen – that there is overall bias – of Prescott’s complaints. The defensiveness of presenters such as Robinson and of executives like Deborah Turness and Jonathan Munro, global news director, is striking."
Chris Rose on X - "A reminder that the BBC isn’t being “attacked”. They lied about President Trump. The BBC isn’t the victim, they’re the perpetrators. President Trump suing the BBC isn’t an “attack” on Britain. A national broadcaster which spreads lies is not one worth defending."
Christian May on X - "Not a peep on BBC News at Ten about fast moving China spying story. Strange decision, in my view."
Sharron Davies MBE on X - "I truly despair for what the bbc has become, a once world wide respected news source. The malignant shame is we are still forced to pay for what seems more like student politics news activism every day. Is it time to make the bbc pay for view ?"
