A sloppy edit turns Trump into a crusader against bias, stepping in to protect us from a broadcasting corporation already leaning his way
The debate over the BBC’s misleading edit of Donald Trump’s Capitol Hill speech is quite a muddle. Trump is performatively posturing with a line about how the BBC has deeply wounded his reputation by wilfully presenting him as a ‘radical, aggressively stirring violence at the White House, when in fact he’s simply a benign, peace-loving moderate’.
Tangled in the rigging
The muddle begins with Trump effectively accusing the BBC of rigging his speech. However, the speech was itself delivered to support protests about the alleged rigging of the 2020 election results to steal victory from Trump.
Furthermore, Trump’s sob story is, arguably, a ruse to conceal his and his UK far-right accomplices’ intentions. Having persuaded the world that the BBC is hopelessly woke, the aim is then to either replace it with a suitable propaganda vehicle for the far-right, or transform it into a full-throttle far-right mouthpiece. So, Trump’s attack on the BBC is evidently also a rigged campaign with a (poorly concealed) agenda.
The BBC has apologised for its careless edit. But, predictably, Trump doesn’t want to lose this golden opportunity to trash an organisation he can present as dangerously insurgent. So he is ignoring the apology and steaming ahead with suing the BBC to the tune of $1bn – $5bn.
Toy throwing
After some debate, the BBC has decided to ‘do a Hugh Grant’ and ‘stand up to the US bully’, rather than backing off and instead perhaps offering an out-of-court settlement for Trump to add to his lucrative collection of extortions from other media organisations.
It’s worth saying that the honourable route is risky because it’s hard to see how a court case could avoid quickly leading to stand offs between the BBC and Trump over whether he was, in fact, instrumental in inciting violence on 6 Jan; also on whether the 2020 election was, in fact, egregiously stolen from him.
If Trump can’t even handle the notion that the BBC misreported him, he definitely won’t cope with this latest bete noir telling the world’s front pages that he incited violence and in service to specious lies about stolen elections.
Even if Trump loses the court case, which is likely, this ‘nasty truth-telling’ could trigger a toy-throwing meltdown, a comprehensive hate campaign that would make a mockery of Starmer’s carefully curated Trump appeasements.
We could find ourselves showered with all manner of punishments including an even bigger BBC penalty for taxpayers, a ceremonial tearing up of the UK tariff agreement, plus anything else this interfering child despot can conjure, from occupying Guernsey to designating our fishing fleets as drug cartels.
Bullies make terrible partners but separation is somewhere between unpleasant and horrendous. A neurotic, spiteful narcissist feeling cruelly spurned by his special friend is a loose cannon. It’s not that one should defer to bullies, only that we should strap in for some outlandish consequences.
The new bias
But aside from the debate over who is doing the rigging, who the real propaganda mouthpiece is here, and how to respond, there’s a further complication.
The UK commentariat has rallied quickly to the BBC’s side, earnestly appealing to its impartiality to counter Trump’s devious far-right onslaught. But the corporation isn’t impartial, at least, not any more.
The BBC news rightly deserves its traditional global reputation as a trusted voice of authority and fine journalism. But over the last 15 years it has lost its prized impartiality status. Why?
Leaning right
The right-wing has a little cache of cases to ‘prove’ that, in fact, the BBC is a left-leaning rag which Trump has rightly observed needs cleaning up. Aside from the editing fiasco, they roll out examples such as the BBC’s alleged anti-Israel bias and pro-Hamas reporting on Gaza.
But there are more compelling reasons for viewing the BBC as leaning the other way. Here’s five:
- First, BBC bias has to be viewed in the context of the heavily right-wing makeup of its top team. To help deliver Brexit, Boris Johnson infiltrated the corporation with numerous Conservative figureheads. It is completely implausible to insist that key political appointments such as Robbie Gibb and Tim Davie have no influence on output.
- Second, the BBC became increasingly vulnerable because of financial difficulties arising from ever-increasing competition with other forms of media and changing public tastes in news consumption. This fuelled a rightward shift because it became increasingly necessary to appease the dominant establishment view. So, journalistic independence began to shrink. As Lewis Goodall notes, BBC journalists were told to write “as if they had the Daily Mail on their shoulder”.
- Third, and in line with the above, studies show numerous instances of right-wing bias: the BBC gave 33 times more attention to Israeli than Palestinian deaths in the Gaza conflict. Domestically, right-wing politicians generally receive over 50% more BBC airtime than left-wing politicians. Question Time is a clear example of massive BBC “over-platforming” of Reform.
- Fourth, these instances are just part of a relentless daily drip-feed of anti-left commentary across platforms from a whole stable of BBC journalists. This subtle spread of bias is a ubiquitous feature of the BBC’s slanted reporting, setting “a tone across articles, topics and time, that is cumulatively formidable”.
- Fifth, in attacking BBC left-wing bias, the far-right, insatiable as ever, is demanding its pound of flesh. The BBC’s attempts to appease the right can never go far enough. Shouting at the corporation for being ‘woke left’ when it’s already manifestly right-leaning is both an exercise in gaslighting and a flogging whip to make the horse canter rightwards even faster.
Newsflash: Trump gets it right
Thus we have a curious and even more complicated situation where we have to acknowledge that Trump’s accusation is partly correct. The BBC is biased, just not typically in the way he claims.
If we accept that the UK establishment’s assiduous defence of BBC impartiality is false then this puts the BBC in further jeopardy. As is so often the case with far-right attacks, they begin with little truths and build on these to create large bodies of lies. So, Trump will exploit this weakness in our defence to strengthen his campaign to destroy the BBC (as we knew it).
What next?
It’s right that the BBC hasn’t acquiesced to Trump’s demands. This would effectively have been to concede that his attack on the BBC as a leftie propaganda mouthpiece is fair. The BBC would then be considerably more vulnerable to being removed or drastically weakened with the floodgates opened to receive GB News style far-right content.
It would also have meant that the BBC is permanently on trial and every step of its reportage minutely examined with gestapo-style vigilance. Its journalists would become chilled to the bone and coerced into truly ugly right-leaning narratives that are far more explicit and extravagent than we’ve seen so far.
But nor should the outcome be that the UK stays resolutely behind a false defence of the BBC as impartial. This cannot stand and is just grist for the far-right’s mill.
A turning point
The Trump episode should provide a turning point. A fortuitous gap has appeared through the resignations of Director General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness. As Secretary of State for Culture and Media, Lisa Nandy must take this opportunity to fill this gap with independent directors and also replace Gibb with a non-political appointment. The government has to ensure that the top personnel at the BBC are genuinely independent and not guided by partisan interests.
The episode also calls for a public Levison-style inquiry involving government-funded scientific research into BBC reporting. It should cover the last 15 years and provide rigorous and comprehensive analyses of the true extent of bias in BBC news coverage and commentary.
Making the BBC great again
Taking these steps to put our own publishing house in order would be a patriotic reminder to the UK far-right that Trump has no right to interfere with our news corporations.
At the same time, Trump’s absurd attack also provides a long-awaited moment finally to get our most cherished and valuable news institution on a properly independent footing, away from the political intereference which, since Johnson’s tenure, has been steadily corrupting it, and away from the new threat of far-right take-overs.
In this age of disinformation, returning the BBC to its position as a global beacon of trustworthy news reporting would be one of the most worthwhile and democracy-preserving actions the government could possibly take.
Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass
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