BBC: despite outrages, needs fixing, not scrapping

Cards on the table: I am a big supporter of an idealised concept of what the BBC can be at its best.

But, boy, do they inflict damage on themselves.  The Panorama[1] / Trump thing is a journalistic outrage, as even hardened anti-Trump lefties with concern for the integrity of journalism agree.  The Panorama “anti-semitism in the Labour Party” is another.  Looks like they had (have?) a rogue LGBTIxyz unit of some kind, busily censoring their colleagues.  Their climate / energy offerings are often pure green-blob output.  Etc etc etc. 

And then you get the opposite: the Panorama in 2022 on Drax and its baleful Canadian operations was masterly, with long-running consequences that haven’t fully played out yet.

Even thin-skinned Trump should recognise the soft power of the Beeb worldwide, and how many western interests it buttresses.  (Incidentally, what possible damages could he claim to have suffered?)  What would step into its shoes?  Domestically, maybe the better ITV and C4 documentaries.  But abroad?  Just commercial and/or dangerous fake-news dross from very unsavoury sources.  

But I’ll end on another condemnatory anecdote, starting with “It was ever thus“.  

Many, many years ago when I was heavily involved in local politics, myself and Mrs D were approached by Panorama to be interviewed on the subject of Child Benefit, on our very own sofa at home, as a representative middle-class married couple with school-aged children.  As the evening wore on and they kept asking us the same questions over and over, it became apparent they were hoping we’d express thus-and-such opinions.  But we didn’t.  They were relentless, eventually telling us fairly precisely the words they wished to put into our mouths.  Well, we weren’t having it; so the extensive footage they’d shot was entirely abortive.

But not the entire evening.  During a break, they asked us if we could put them in touch with other couples in the area, with different profiles to our own.  We mentioned two things: (1) a couple we were willing to sound out for them, who exactly fitted one of the profiles they wanted; and (2) quite separately and en passant, that there was a vantage point up the road from ourselves where some of the most expensive houses in London looked out across a valley, directly towards a huge and fairly rough council estate on the hill opposite.

So what happened?  When the programme aired, whilst Mr & Mrs D did not make an appearance, the other couple did.  And against the backdrop of a camera shot panning from a big house across to the council estate, the introductory voice-over asserted that this was the view from the couple’s own front room.  Except that they didn’t live anywhere near that vantage point …  a complete BBC confection.  Shameless, and deeply unprofessional stuff: but I’m sure someone who’d misinterpreted John Birt’s “mission to explain”[2] just loved it.     

They shoot themselves in the foot, so many times.  And it seems they just can’t help it.  My supportive view of an idealised BBC is, ahem, very idealised indeed.

ND

____________

[1] It’s worth noting that ‘Panorama’ is as much a banner than a BBC department.  Individual programmes they broadcast under that label are generally made by an ad hoc team of independent reporters / researchers assembled for a single programme.

[2] A renowned journo of my acquaintance who’d worked at the Beeb in this era told me how it worked.  Birt’s ‘MtE’ approach was: (a) first, researchers would do a load of rigorous research & analysis on some tricky topic; (b) they’d reach their conclusions on how the issues were to be understood and explained; (c) they’d go out into the world and find interviewees etc to “illustrate” what they’d concluded, creating an explanatory narrative.

How this worked in practice was:  a bunch of people – generally lefties – who had no genuine expertise on the topic, would sit at their desks discussing and arguing for weeks, with a few facts and opinions thrown in.  They’d reach their conclusions essentially a priori from their baleful assumptions and leftist worldview, and write their narrative.  They’d then set out to find and interview (and of course put words into the mouths of) people that were selected as archetypes, often outright caricatures, of the various viewpoints featuring in their narrative, in order to bring it alive for a TV audience.  Then air the programme.

Little or nothing of this process represented genuine, open-minded journalistic research, and at worst was the kind of pre-ordained confection we still see in such outrages as the Trump speech-splicing episode. 

Source: http://www.cityunslicker.co.uk/2025/11/bbc-needs-fixing-not-despite-outrages.html