The Bias Meltdown at the BBC

We do mean “whoppers.” Mr. Trump is up in arms because an episode of the Panorama television news show last year spliced together two snippets of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that he uttered nearly an hour apart. The point was to suggest to viewers that Mr. Trump had urged supporters to storm the Capitol.

The same program showed footage of the Proud Boys marching to Capitol Hill after it aired the fake clip from Mr. Trump’s speech, creating the impression they had heeded his call to action. But that Proud Boy footage was shot before Mr. Trump started speaking that day. Forget media bias—this is an alternate dimension of reality.

The BBC’s coverage of transgender issues came to be controlled by an “LGBTQ desk” within the newsroom that suppressed reporting contrary to liberal orthodoxy. Citing another internal report, Mr. Prescott observes the BBC ran “a surprisingly high number of stories about drag queens” while all but ignoring growing concern about the safety of medical treatments for people experiencing gender dysphoria.

Mr. Prescott describes endemic failures in the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Its English-language reports were prone to a credulous attitude toward any criticism of Israel.

The Arabic-language service appears to have run entirely amok. BBC Arabic failed to translate many stories that might offer a positive perspective on Israel, and it has been forced to correct two stories per week, on average, since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack.

Left-wing media bias is old hat, and complaints about the BBC date at least to Margaret Thatcher’s day. But this is a parable about the perils of public ownership of the means of producing anything, especially news.

The BBC is a “public broadcaster” in a way that would shock Americans. Any household that watches live television—even if they never watch the BBC—must pay an annual television tax of £174.50 called the license fee, or face a fine of £1,000. The tax generates £3.8 billion in annual revenue, despite falling household compliance.

Progressive journalists found ways to leverage that taxpayer support to advance their own agendas. Conservative Party politicians occasionally threatened to reform the broadcaster. But to date the Beeb has proven resistant to discipline. Mr. Davie is a case in point: A Conservative Party member earlier in his life, the BBC board hired him in 2020 in part to reassure the Tory administration that was in power at the time. Mr. Davie was captured by the leftwing BBC culture.

The reality is that once you’ve created a publicly owned company of any sort, it’s all but impossible for a conservative to control. Mr. Trump, having had his own brush with the BBC this weekend, can reflect on that as he pursues big-government industrial policies in plenty of other industries closer to home.