Written by The British Broadcasting Corporation is a national asset that needs protecting and defending, not discrediting and dismantling, which is what its enemies, mostly in bad faith, are trying to do.
In a bruised and bleeding world teeming with liars, it is a light shining in the darkness – despite the best efforts of those who see it as standing in the way of their own lust for power and wealth. It is disturbing, therefore, when the BBC falters in its mission of service to the truth. These are not only its own values, but sacred values. There is a higher moral and spiritual cost to each error and mistake it makes.
Such stumbles on the way are also inevitable, and what matters is that they be acknowledged and addressed openly, honestly and promptly. And it is here that the BBC has come under closest scrutiny – and been found wanting. In the process, it has been revealed as a little bit too willing to believe in its own rectitude, even its own impeccability. Humility is not among its most conspicuous characteristics. It is all the more important that it now does the right thing. What that immediately consists of is to admit it has made mistakes, but to refuse to be bullied by Donald Trump.
The US President has threatened to sue the BBC for defamation, preposterously claiming a billion dollars in damages, because a Panorama documentary spliced together two sections of a speech he gave in Washington DC on 6 January 2021 to make it appear he deliberately incited a violent riot at the Capitol building, where Congress was preparing to certify that Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election. This was a serious error, which the BBC was too slow to acknowledge. But the thrust of the allegation against Trump was reasonable. He was undoubtedly stirring up trouble. If such a libel case came to trial, the BBC should plead justification, and mount a full defence.
In the course of this controversy, more serious blemishes in the BBC’s duty to be impartial have come to light. In its coverage of the Gaza conflict, the BBC’s Arabic service was significantly more critical of Israel than the BBC’s English-language website, and used several contributors who were explicitly antisemitic. That could partly be Israel’s own mistake for refusing to let international journalists into Gaza. But it represents a betrayal of the BBC’s own values, and a breach of trust. In the domestic sphere, it became the practice for BBC news stories concerning sex and gender to be referred to a special in-house unit – a group committed to gender theory – for vetting. The lesson here for the BBC is to be alert to the dangers of “capture” by any prevailing social trend or fashion among its staff. Mistakes in journalism are inevitable. The health of the BBC should not be measured by its occasional errors of judgement, but by its ability to learn from them. And that is what it now needs to do.
From The Editor, The Tablet, 13 November 2025
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