WHEN Tim Davie became BBC Director-General in September 2020 he declared that his number one priority was restoring the Corporation’s impartiality. Five years later, after industrial levels of W1A 1AA-style hot-air pledges, his mission lies in ruins.
Its demise? Monday’s Daily Telegraph revelations from BBC whistleblower Michael Prescott confirm what my organisation News-watch has consistently warned on the basis of meticulous monitoring of output for 25 years: that the Corporation is not simply biased, but pathologically incapable of recognising or acknowledging its own bias.
Further, the Telegraph investigations also show that the BBC is now so locked into its own worldview (left/Marxism = good, everything else = bad) that it will go to almost any lengths to pursue it. Including crudely and crassly doctoring a speech delivered by Donald Trump in the aftermath of his electoral defeat in 2021 so that it conveyed the exact opposite of what he said. A call for peaceful protest was converted into the exact opposite.
Prescott, a former external adviser on the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC), produced for the BBC Board a devastating internal dossier – now leaked to the Telegraph – showing how the BBC also systematically misled viewers in the more general coverage of the 2024 US Presidential election. In the run-up to the poll, the BBC One programme Panorama included extracts from the Trump speech delivered on Capitol Hill in January 2021. It was crudely spliced to omit his crucial call for supporters to act ‘peacefully and patriotically’, and instead conveyed that he had urged supporters to ‘fight like hell’.
Internal BBC reports to the ESGC also detail how coverage of the whole presidential race was massively biased; polling was cherry-picked to favour the Democrats, Kamala Harris-friendly narratives were inflated, and critical scrutiny of the Democrats not pursued.
This amounts to sinister editorial manipulation by the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme. It happened on Tim Davie’s watch after five years of loudly trumpeted impartiality reforms. Egregiously the BBC’s own alleged fact-checking unit Verify, which costs £100,000 a month to run, did not lift a finger to investigate.
Who should carry the can? Tim Davie himself must now be firmly in the line of fire and will likely be hastily summoned to appear before the Department of Culture’s Select Committee. Michael Prescott became a whistleblower and went to the BBC Board after his concerns were not taken seriously enough by the executive arm’s ESG committee. According to the Telegraph, he levelled particular criticism at Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s senior controller of news content, and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News. Their jobs must now also be in serious doubt.
The BBC’s first instinct as this sorry saga unfolded? As always, denial. Executives failed to accept or act upon Prescott’s concerns. The same machinery that created the distortion was then tasked with investigating it.
That is the root problem: the BBC is both broadcaster and adjudicator. It writes its own rules, marks its own homework and publishes its own acquittals.
Every BBC impartiality review since 2020 – on important subjects such as tax and spending and immigration – has been conducted by people inside or paid by the BBC. With weary predictability, each concludes that ‘lessons have been learned’ and ‘processes strengthened’. Such scrutiny is not rigorous enough.
The biased BBC keeps producing same-vein scandals: Martin Bashir’s forged documents in his Princess Diana interview, Gaza’s undisclosed Hamas link, the branding of Reform UK as ‘far-right’, and now Panorama’s doctoring of Trump’s words.
The pattern is unmistakable. The BBC’s self-regulatory system does not correct bias: it normalises and in effect sanctions it through confirmation bias.
Davie’s so-called ‘Impartiality Action Plan’ was full of promise: new training, stricter social media rules and the creation of BBC Verify, billed as the newsroom’s ‘truth engine’. But Verify checks everyone except the BBC. It will dissect a photo from Gaza or a tweet from a politician, yet it stayed silent while a BBC documentary falsified the record of a former US president. That is not verification – it is institutional self-hypnosis.
The Corporation’s favourite shield, that only ‘due impartiality’ must be achieved, has become a catch-all excuse. It allows editors to decide which viewpoints deserve airtime and which can be dismissed as ‘denialism’, ‘populism’ or ‘disinformation’. Thus climate alarmist orthodoxy is framed as settled, sacred fact. Those who favour a more decisive Brexit are treated as extremists, Reform supporters are branded ‘far-right’ and ‘racist’, and ordinary conservative voices are airbrushed into the margins.
The real story behind Prescott’s memo is not one rogue programme but a structural conflict of interest. No organisation, least of all a taxpayer-funded one, can be trusted to investigate its own editorial failures when its leadership’s survival depends on minimising them.
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit is part of the same hierarchy it purports to police. Ofcom, which theoretically oversees the Corporation, is complacent, useless and toothless: since 2017 it has upheld only a handful of impartiality complaints about the BBC.
The result is a closed system of self-absolution. The BBC boasts of accountability, but it’s a total illusion. If the BBC’s own impartiality mechanisms collapse under their own contradictions, the remedy must come from beyond Broadcasting House.
News-watch argues that the Charter review now due must include:
- A statutory Public Media Ombudsman – independent of both the BBC and Ofcom – empowered to investigate and issue binding rulings on accuracy and impartiality;
- Full transparency: mandatory release of transcripts, guest-balance data, and internal correspondence for all news and current-affairs output;
- External audits: regular independent content analyses, published quarterly, covering political framing, language bias, and story selection;
- A redefinition of impartiality, replacing the evasive phrase ‘due impartiality’ with a clear duty to reflect the full range of public opinion.
Only an independent ombudsman armed with subpoena powers and public reporting can end the BBC’s status as its own judge and jury.
The BBC likes to present its failures as technical blips. But the truth is moral. When a publicly funded broadcaster edits the words of an elected leader, suppresses internal warnings, and hides behind a fog of ‘process’, it ceases to be a news organisation and becomes a narrative factory.
Tim Davie built his reputation on promising to restore trust. After the Prescott revelations, that promise looks empty. If the BBC truly believes in accountability, it should start by proving it by inviting an inquiry it does not control.
Until that happens, the Corporation’s impartiality claims are totally hollow.
