The true scandal isn’t just the right’s distortion of BBC bias, it’s the rot within the system that allowed this farce to happen.
The vultures barely waited for the body to go cold. By Monday morning, the smug right-wing press were crowing over the resignations of director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness amid accusations of bias.
“Beeb boss quits over Trump lies,” shrieked the Sun.
“BBC bosses quit in disgrace,” cheered the Daily Mail.
The next day, they had the added bonus of plastering their front pages with Donald Trump’s threat: “Grovel – or I’ll sue you for $1 billion.”
The hysteria began in the BBC-averse Telegraph, no less, which was handed a loaded gun in the form of an internal “dossier” written by Michael Prescott, a former political editor of the Sunday Times turned PR executive. Until June this year, Prescott sat as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board.
The 19-page document, sent to the BBC board, alleged “serious apparent bias,” including “rogue LGBT+ reporters” censoring debate on trans issues, BBC Arabic giving “extensive space” to Hamas, and, its smoking gun, that Panorama had doctored a Trump speech to make it appear that Trump had encouraged violence on January 6.
Prescott’s anti-BBC report contains doctored quote
As the right took the moral high ground over Panorama’s allegedly misleading edit of Trump’s Capitol Hill speech, a new twist in the fast-moving story revealed that Prescott’s own report contains misleading quotes.
In the document, Prescott writes:
“Fifteen minutes into the speech, what Trump actually said: ‘We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.’ It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it.”
However, as James Ball reports in the New World, this is not what Donald Trump actually said. Prescott has heavily edited the remarks, altering their meaning.
Ball also explains how just as Prescott notes that television has rules requiring broadcasters to make clear when a quote has been edited or abridged, the same standards apply in print. When shortening a quotation, an ellipsis should be used. Prescott has not done so.
“In a fair world, Prescott’s apparent error would be seen as at least as serious as the original supposed mistake made by Panorama,” writes Ball.
And just as revealing as what the dossier included is what it left out. There’s no mention of the corporation’s coverage of politics, business, education, health, the royal family, domestic affairs, climate change, crime, or even Ukraine.
“Did Prescott ever think to ask whether the same objections that he raised over the treatment of Trump might be applied to the BBC’s treatment of Putin?” asks journalist David Aaronovitch in an op-ed in the Observer that questions the impartiality of the document at the heart of the controversy. .
“So Prescott zeroes in on the culture war plus Gaza agenda. Because these seem to be the things that bother him, not because these are all the things a conscientious adviser might be bothered by,” he adds.
Prescott’s dossier is looking less and less like a whistleblower’s warning and more and more like a political grenade.
Prescott bailed out of journalism 24 years ago for a lucrative career in corporate PR and serves as managing director at Hanover Communications, a PR company with links to the Conservative party. Official EU and UK lobbying disclosures seen by Byline Times show Hanover represents a number of US tech and entertainment giants, including Oracle, Apple, Meta and Paramount. Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison, a Trump ally and Republican megadonor, who recently briefly overtook Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, helped build the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’ personnel database for a future Trump administration. Ellison’s son David now chairs Paramount Skydance, following a merger with the entertainment powerhouse that owns CBS.
And it gets worse.
Prescott’s post on the BBC’s editorial board was reportedly secured under the influence of Sir Robbie Gibb, BBC board member and co-founder of GB News.
Gibb’s fingerprints are everywhere. A self-described “Thatcherite Conservative” and former Downing Street communications chief under Theresa May, now sits in judgment over BBC impartiality. Trump, according to his lawyer, is “very fond” of GB News’s “fair and accurate reporting.” Its co-owner hedge fund multimillionaire Paul Marshall, who also owns the Spectator and UnHerd, has previously called for the BBC to be sold, describing it as squatting “like a giant toad in the middle of the UK media landscape.”
The right’s punching bag
For years, the BBC has been the right’s favourite punching bag, too ‘woke,’ too ‘globalist,’ too unwilling to parrot the culture war lines coming out of Westminster and Mar-a-Lago alike.
Davie’s resignation was the scalp they’d been waiting for.
Never mind the details, the facts, that Senate, Congressional and legal investigations into Trump’s conduct on January 6 concluded he bore responsibility for the insurrection that followed.
Just slap ‘disgrace’ across your front page and tell your readers you ‘told them so.’
Yes, Panorama made an error. The failure to re-edit a mis-spliced Trump clip was serious, but hardly a scandal of world-historical proportions. As Sky’s former political editor Adam Boulton observed, summarising long speeches through edits is standard practice, and the overall impression that Trump encouraged the riots, was correct.
Yet when the Murdoch-owned Times publishes a fake interview with a former New York mayor during an election campaign, no one called for heads to roll. The Murdoch empire has spent decades attacking the BBC, while paying billions to settle phone-hacking and corruption cases.
This crusade isn’t about media standards, it’s about power.
And never mind that the Telegraph, the very paper that has fanned the outrage, is mired in its own chaos. Its long-running sale saga, tangled in political interference and editorial controversy, remains as turbulent and uncertain as ever.
And the Daily Mail, that immigrant-baiting, NHS-undermining tabloid, never apologised for its fabricated “Beergate” story that falsely accused Keir Starmer of breaking lockdown rules with a pre-pandemic photo.
Where were the cries of “fake news”? Where were the demands to “grovel or be sued”? Interestingly the most recent survey that I’ve seen, finds that while 60% of people trust the BBC for their news, that falls to 24% for the Mail.
Which brings us on to Boris Johnson. The former prime minister who was actually found guilty of breaking lockdown laws, urged readers in his Mail column to boycott the licence fee unless Tim Davie offered a “convincing explanation” for its supposed bias. The corporation, he thundered, had been “caught red-handed in multiple acts of left-wing bias.”
This is the man who tried to install Paul Dacre, the former Daily Mail editor, as chair of Ofcom, the UK’s supposedly independent media regulator. Dacre, a long-time scourge of the BBC, bombed his interview so spectacularly that even a government eager to please the press couldn’t save him. Despite efforts to give him a second chance, he eventually withdrew.
Analyses that ‘sinks without a trace’
And while the right scream “leftist bias,” evidence points the other way. A Cardiff University study found Reform featured in 49 BBC News at Ten bulletins between January and July this year, whereas the Lib Dems, who have 72 MPs, featured in just 35 bulletins.
The Centre for Media Monitoring found BBC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza gave Israeli deaths 33 times more attention per fatality than Palestinian ones. As Politico’s editor Alan Rusbridger notes: “Such analyses tend to sink without trace. Is this, in itself, a form of bias?”
Rusbridger raises another crucial point – who exactly sits on the BBC board, the body that received Prescott’s “dossier.” Of its 13 members, which according to Prescott dismissed his concerns, five, including chair Samir Shah, are appointed by the government. The rest are heavy on business and private equity backgrounds but light on journalism.
The committee overseeing editorial standards is equally conflicted. Three insiders, Shah, Davie, Turness, sit alongside Gibb and former BBC COO Caroline Thomson. Prescott, notably, served as an adviser to this same group. It’s an uncomfortable tangle of those enforcing standards and those accused of breaching them, a “motley bunch,” as Rusbridger describes it.
Gibb’s record speaks for itself. In 2020, he helped lead a consortium to buy the Jewish Chronicle, a paper accused of, on occasion. publishing fabricated stories about Israel’s war in Gaza. Several senior columnists resigned from the newspaper this year, including Jonathan Freedland, who said the paper “too often reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgments political rather than journalistic.”
Yet Gibb remains a supposed arbiter of impartiality within the BBC, appointed by Boris Johnson and confirmed by Rishi Sunak.
Who guards the guardians?
So who guards the guardians? As Rusbridger put it: “If I were a BBC journalist, under such intensive scrutiny and fire, I’m not sure I would be terribly comforted by these governance arrangements…. I’d wonder why such close editorial scrutiny should have been entrusted to three key people who themselves rejected journalism in order to enjoy lucrative careers in corporate and political communications. Who, bluntly, would you trust more to be impartial on the Middle East—Robbie Gibb, Michael Prescott or Lyse Doucet? Why should the PR professionals who turned their own backs on journalism sit in judgment on the latter?”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump grins like the cat who got the cream. In a statement praising the Telegraph for “exposing” BBC corruption, his team declared the corporation “100% fake news.”
The true scandal isn’t just the right’s distortion of BBC bias, it’s the rot within the system that allowed this farce to happen. Prescott’s dossier, leaked from within and weaponised by the press, shows how corporate lobbyists and political operatives have captured the very machinery of media accountability.
Outside Broadcasting House stands a statue of George Orwell, inscribed with his words: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
The irony is gut-wrenching. Those who claim to defend truth are the ones strangling it. If they succeed, we may as well take the statue down.
The question remains: will ‘Auntie’, unlike the American broadcast media, be bold enough not to cower to Trump and his demands? As Alan Rusbridger observes, there’s only one way for the BBC to salvage some dignity from the smoking rubble of the past week – with a four-word message: “See you in court.”
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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