This is the nub of the thing. To his credit, Tim Davie, when he was appointed in the autumn of 2020, made restoring the BBC’s reputation for impartiality his highest priority. Davie was astute enough to understand that the patience of many Tories was exhausted. He knew they were fed-up with the liberal-Left bias of the Corporation’s output, not just in news and current affairs but in drama and comedy too. He understood that, for the good times to return, the BBC had to reform itself.
But can anyone point to any actual change in its output in the past 18 months? The BBC has so far proved highly resistant to this financial pressure. A BBC insider, someone close to the reform process, put it this way to me: “So far, the BBC has signed off on the policy of reform, but as yet a lot of BBC people have not signed up to actual reform.” I think this gets close to the heart of the matter. It is one thing for the top brass to promise a return to impartiality but how can that be achieved, in reality, in BBC newsrooms? How in other words do you make journalists tailor their work so that it isn’t so aligned with the contemporary obsessions of the liberal-Left? How do you de-woke the BBC?
The signs are not promising. The row last year about the appointment of Jess Brammar as the BBC’s executive news editor arose because her Tweets made her sound anti-Boris, anti-Tory and a bit of a social-justice warrior. In other words: exactly the kind of employee the BBC has been favouring for decades. Warm words about “reform” look meaningless in the face of that sort of hiring. But 10 days ago, the BBC announced a new chief of news and current affairs, Deborah Turness, who replaces the long-serving Fran Unsworth: perhaps the new boss will give reform new impetus.
In my view, the BBC needs to take a step back from chasing every scoop and avoid joining in with every media “pile-on” like the one currently surrounding Boris Johnson and his partying habits (which give a whole new meaning to the phrase “social conservatives”). The BBC should be slightly distant from the rat pack – not leading it.
