The BBC is bigger than news

Last Thursday was a good night for the BBC. The final of The Celebrity Traitors filled cinemas, bars and Boxpark shopping centres with watch parties. Punters in fancy dress – mainly as Claudia Winkleman – played games, drank cocktails and cheered and booed the big screen.

At home, record-breaking numbers were tuning in live – a peak of 11.1 million people – making it the biggest overnight audience since the BBC’s own record-breaking Gavin & Stacey viewing on Christmas Day last year (12.3 million). Of course, alongside The Celebrity Traitors, the BBC’s 14 other national and regional TV stations and 14 national radio services were pumping out music, news and entertainment while 40 local and regional radio stations were covering their communities.

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In Glasgow, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – one of five professional orchestras funded by the corporation – was at City Halls accompanying a screening of the 1935 horror classic Bride of Frankenstein. In Swansea, the BBC Orchestra and Chorus of Wales performed an evening of music inspired by nature, starting with Ralph Vaughan Williams The Wasps. In Denmark Street, central London, BBC Music Introducing, an online platform for unsigned artists, showcased new talent at the Lower Third venue.

The licence fee costs £174.50. Netflix without ads costs £155.88 per year and on 6 November came without orchestras, gigs, news or Mike Gunton, creative director of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, telling the Linnean Society of London in Piccadilly how it films the trickiest scenes in shows such as Planet Earth and Prehistoric Planet, or BBC Apprenticeships’ latest live webinar on AI in business – part lecture, part guide to applying for apprenticeships at the corporation. The list of things the BBC was doing that filtered into people’s lives that night was very long indeed.

On Sunday, its director-general, Tim Davie, and its head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned. That’s all people are thinking about right now. Or perhaps that’s all the Westminster media bubble is thinking about. Why did they go?

Was it purely because a leaked internal memo by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser and political editor of the Sunday Times, identified, among other things, a deceptive edit of a speech delivered by Donald Trump on 6 January 2021, just before his supporters stormed the Capitol?

Prescott’s list of concerns presented the BBC as a left-leaning, pro-Hamas news organisation unwilling to discuss uncomfortable topics such as transgender issues, immigration and colonialism. His memo was triggering for a faction of the deeply divided board of BBC governors, paralysing the corporation’s response to the story.

Last Monday, Turness reportedly proposed an apology for the Trump edit that failed to earn the board’s approval, so nothing happened. The fury of the press and Trump grew, and you cannot help to think that Davie’s departure was less that of a director-general who had lost the faith of the board, than that of one who had lost faith in the board. Robbie Gibb, the former Conservative press secretary at 10 Downing Street, appointed by Boris Johnson in 2021, has been marked out as the catalyst of the board shutdown, but there are other equally trenchant views.

So is the BBC biased? A lot of loud voices are convinced of it. The Prescott report accused the corporation’s Arabic service, in particular, of pro-Hamas bias. And yet in November last year, more than 100 staff wrote to Davie complaining that it had become a mouthpiece for Israel.

In September, the Liberal Democrats launched a Balance the BBC petition, accusing the broadcaster of “wall-to-wall coverage” of Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Yesterday, Farage said the BBC “has been institutionally biased for decades” in favour of the left.

What do the British people think? There has been a long-running biannually updated YouGov poll on the public’s view. In 2020, by far the largest single group of UK residents – about 34% – did not have a strong opinion, while about 25% thought the BBC was neutral. Since October 2024, those voting for a neutral view has risen and the number of “no opinions” has fallen. In September, it stood at 28% and 29%, respectively. About 50% of the country perceives a bias at the BBC, but they are almost evenly split between those who see a leftwing conspiracy and those who are sure the corporation is rightwing.

Anyone drawing firm conclusions of bias from this is ignoring an awful lot of data. The truth is, most people don’t see a bias except for those who are convinced the BBC is against them. On Thursday, at least one fifth of the country was more concerned with who would win the Celebrity Traitors.

The BBC may not be viewed as it once was – meaning on TV, by everyone, most days of the week. But it reaches into our cultural lives in countless ways. Long before innovation was venerated, the BBC was an innovator. It helped develop teletext, digital radio and HD TV – launching the world’s first regular HD TV broadcasts in 1936. It led the way in outside broadcasts and location filming – the Natural History Unit is now the largest producer of wildlife documentaries in the world.

David Attenborough’s drive for innovation, combined with the production companies that sprang up around the BBC’s natural history studios, dubbed Green Hollywood, mean many of the world’s natural history programmes are now made in and around Bristol. (As an aside, tennis balls are yellow thanks to Sir Attenborough who, as then controller of BBC2, owned one of the first four colour television cameras in the country and noticed that white tennis balls did not stand out on this new system.)

BBC news is more than just the world’s largest video news producer. In large parts of the country, BBC regional news is the only local news people see. It was a shock to see Davie depart days after ITV announced it was discussing being sold to BSkyB. Former ITV chair Peter Bazalgette told The Observer that regional news was too expensive for ITV.  “We have reached the point,” he said, “where delivering regional news is more expensive than the cost of the licence. Things will have to change.”

In 2011, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota conducted an unusual but chilling research project. In 1977, the Cincinnati Post and a competing newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, agreed the latter would support the former for 30 years as its decline in circulation seemed fatal. This had an explicit endpoint on 31 December 2007, and the Post closed that day.

Economists at the bank gathered data between 2003 and 2010 and found the Post’s closure was followed by a measurable decrease in voters going to the polls, fewer new faces running for office and more incumbent politicians staying in place. The political life of those communities slowly lost vigour and life.

In 2016, Dr Rachel Howells of Cardiff University examined the case of Port Talbot in south Wales, where reporting on local council meetings, public meetings and political party meetings dropped from 45.6% in 1980 to 4.7% in 2013. Port Talbot lost its last weekly newspaper in 2009. Seven years later, some of Howells’ interviewees were getting news about road closures from graffiti.

Yesterday, Nigel Farage said the licence fee was unsustainable and that the BBC would have no future unless it could provide what he called “straight news”.

Caveat disruptor: when people call for the scrapping of the licence fee, or cuts in what the BBC offers, or demand its closure because it’s not impartial, it may be worth remembering that the BBC is unique and probably irreplaceable in giving the people of this country the chance to see their lives on screen, and the right to access reporting on those who govern it. Without that, it’s hard to imagine news coverage overall being more impartial or fair. Imagine a country where most political discourse takes place on social media. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Photograph by Andy Paradise/BBC