The BBC’s never-ending crisis

Last week, BBC director-general Tim Davie was preparing to launch a fresh start for the national broadcaster after months of turmoil.

In April, Richard Sharp had resigned as chair of the BBC because of a perceived conflict of interest over his relationship with former prime minister Boris Johnson at the time he was appointed to the job. That was just weeks after a political furore around the football presenter Gary Lineker, who had compared the government’s immigration rhetoric to Germany in the 1930s.

For Davie, the launch of the BBC’s annual report, which took place this week, would be an opportunity to wipe the slate clean.

Instead, Davie was alerted last Thursday by the BBC’s press office that The Sun newspaper was planning an exposé about one of his top presenters which involved claims of paying a teenager for explicit pictures.

It was the start of a swirling and rancorous scandal that has dominated the national conversation for more than a week — not least of all, on the BBC itself. But it has also exposed just how vulnerable an institution the BBC is in the current media and political climate.

A week after the first report, there is still little concrete information about whether Huw Edwards, the presenter of the News at Ten, has actually done anything unprofessional or unethical.

The police have already concluded there was no criminal behaviour. He has been suspended by the BBC while it conducts its own investigation. According to his wife Vicky Flind, Edwards, who has talked publicly in the past about his struggles with depression, is in hospital after “suffering from serious mental health issues”.

While many other details remain unclear, the Edwards furore is the latest demonstration of how the BBC has become a political punching bag in an era of populist politics, its aspirations for impartiality lampooned by critics on the right and left as an establishment cop-out.

Particularly for sections on the right of the Conservative party — and for a number of rightwing newspapers including The Sun — the BBC is often easy fodder for culture war-style attacks. Many of those same papers also resent the compulsory licence fee that British TV viewers pay to support the BBC.

Within days of the first allegations about a then unnamed presenter, Lee Anderson, deputy chairman of the Conservative party, accused the BBC of being “a safe haven for perverts” and called for the licence fee to be scrapped.

Even in the best of times, says a former board member, the BBC exists in a state of “perma-crisis”. In a bid to maintain its image of transparency, the BBC often reports exhaustively on itself — but sometimes that only serves to amplify the criticisms of the way it operates.

“The BBC has to transact its day-to-day business surrounded by a circular firing squad of rightwing newspapers,” says David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun. “The one thing the BBC can never be accused of is censorship or not covering itself properly, but the problem is the enemies of the BBC know that, so they rely on the BBC assisting in destroying itself.”

Newsroom figurehead

For the BBC, this week has become a painful reminder of a crisis from over a decade ago. In 2012, it emerged that Jimmy Savile, who had been a prominent BBC presenter and personality for decades, had been a serial sexual abuser and rapist. Not only was the BBC later found to have enabled his behaviour, it cancelled a posthumous exposé of him after his death in 2011.

While the new allegations are very different to the claims against Savile, one senior reporter says: “Anything that links us to child protection failure is basically the worst possible story for us”. The Savile scandal, which continues to be raised by critics of the BBC, was a major factor in the 2012 downfall of George Entwistle, then director-general.

It is also damaging that the allegations have been made against the figurehead of the BBC newsroom. Not only does Edwards present the flagship nightly news programme, but he also fronts major national events — from election night to the recent coronation. His was the voice that announced the death of the Queen to millions of homes. To many in Britain, Edwards epitomises the idea of the BBC as a public service broadcaster that can, at times, unite the nation.

For Davie, the story in The Sun left him scrambling to show that he was taking the allegations seriously — but also not rushing to judgment in the absence of conclusive evidence.

When it was revealed that the BBC’s complaints team had known about the claims since May, politicians demanded to know why the allegations had not been elevated more quickly to the senior executives, and why more was not done to contact the family or speak to the presenter.

The BBC says it tried twice to reach the family — once by email and a second time by phone — but had not attempted to contact them since June 6. Edwards was not approached until last Thursday, just before the Sun story appeared — which was when Davie also first learnt about the claims. Davie has ordered a review of the BBC’s internal procedures.

Despite the unhappiness with some in the newsroom, BBC insiders say that Davie’s job is secure. “He could only make decisions based on the information he had and the organisation moved very quickly when it went to Davie,” says one BBC executive. “Whether he should have been told before is another matter and that’s what we’ll look at next.”

Only last year, the BBC had to conduct another internal probe over the conduct of former Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood, which found that there may have been times when the corporation should have done more to investigate allegations against him. The corporation has acknowledged it received six complaints about bullying and sexual misconduct, which the DJ denies.

The BBC ran a live blog providing minute-to-minute coverage of its own crisis through the week, with the frequent sight on BBC news of its own reporters standing outside the BBC seeking comment from itself over allegations against the then unnamed BBC star.

Current and former BBC staff are now questioning whether the broadcaster went too far in trying to break allegations in its news reporting of the scandal in a bid to prove independence.

Jon Sopel, a former correspondent for the BBC, says “that The Sun newspaper and BBC News need to look at themselves over some of the reporting because all it amounts to is someone with a complicated private life and mental health issues”.

“I think that the BBC will definitely come out tarnished from this,” says another former BBC presenter. “I can’t think of any other news organisation that goes after itself so remorselessly.”

Political crosshairs

In recent years, the BBC has come under increasing attack from politicians who accuse it of defending the political status quo, including the Scottish National Party and Labour when it was headed by Jeremy Corbyn.

The most prominent criticism, however, has come from the right and has been amplified by newspapers from the Mail group and from those owned by Rupert Murdoch, including The Sun.

“The BBC is always in the crosshairs of party factions that have spent decades campaigning against its existence,” says Claire Enders, an independent media analyst.

John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, summed up the view of many in the BBC when he told BBC Radio 2 that rightwing press coverage “feeds into a concerted political campaign in this country against the BBC. It’s encouraged by the Murdoch newspapers, by The Telegraph and the Mail group; they want to see effectively the end of the BBC, they want to see it destroyed.”

The populist tone of some of the criticism is often married with complaints about the licence fee. Obliging every TV owner to pay the BBC £159 a year was easier to justify when it was the main provider of news and entertainment: it has become a harder sell when people are also paying for Netflix or Spotify.

The BBC is also under increasing pressure financially given a real-terms fall in income of close to a third since 2010, and expectations that this will worsen as inflation erodes its income given a two-year freeze on the licence fee.

The broadcaster has sought to cut costs and rationalise some of its operations over the past year, but analysts argue that these spending constraints make it even weaker when fighting for viewers against deep-pocketed US tech groups such as Amazon, Netflix and Apple.

The BBC said on Tuesday that it faced “tough choices” about “much loved services”. Earlier this year, the BBC was forced to reverse a decision to cut the BBC Singers chamber choir after pressure from musicians and politicians. But insiders worry what will need to be chopped next, and about whether it will find the money to build the next generation of TV and radio services.

Many at the BBC want to focus attention instead on The Sun for publishing the allegations in the first place, especially after the lawyer for the young person in question said he had issued a denial that the newspaper did not print.

The Independent Press Standards Organisation had received 80 complaints about The Sun’s coverage of the saga and was reviewing them to assess whether the paper had breached the editors’ code, according to a spokesperson. At one stage during the week, Edwards’ Twitter account liked a tweet suggesting The Sun could “face the mother of all libel actions”.

The Sun defended its reporting, saying that it neither named Edwards nor the young person involved in its initial story and adding that it was other media outlets including the BBC that first made “suggestions about possible criminality”.

Amid the many unanswered questions, the stakes appear higher for a state broadcaster seeking to balance impartiality with ethical propriety, than for a tabloid newspaper free to set its own agenda.

“The Sun has done what it does best, it’s damaged the BBC and it’s been talked about in every news bulletin for an entire week,” says David Yelland, the former editor. “The atmosphere at The Sun won’t be negative, it will be positive.”

This article has been amended to reflect that Gary Lineker’s comment was about the government’s immigration rhetoric rather than policy