13.11.2025

Broadcasting House: right want privatisation

Heads roll at BBC

We should not join the rightwing attacks - that almost goes without saying. But the idea that the BBC objectively reports anything is a myth. We need our own, working class, media, says Yassamine Mather

Resignations of the BBC’s director general and the head of BBC News can only be understood as an attempt to appease rightwing opinion, the Tory front bench and now, of course, Donald Trump. It certainly leaves in tatters the BBC myth that it objectively reports politics. It never has and never will.

In fact, the BBC is a loyal servant of the capitalist establishment in Britain (which ultimately means loyalty to Washington and the Atlantic alliance). Having said that, we should not join in the celebrations and the continued rightwing press and media attacks. What they have in mind is replacing the BBC with private outlets far to its right, full of superficial, inaccurate and sensational nonsense. The aim is to replace this partially state-funded and state-controlled corporation, because it obstructs their dream of a fully privatised, for-profit broadcasting outlet like GB News or Fox News.

This latest crisis started with what appears to be clumsy editing.

The Daily Telegraph - or the Torygraph, as many people call it, cried foul over a cut-and-paste job on a Trump speech. This was the pretext needed for the White House to label the BBC broadcast “fake news” and unleash a ferocious attack - a process that has so far cost the jobs of director-general Tim Davie and news editor Deborah Turness. By November 11 Trump’s legal team had written to the BBC, giving them until November 14 to apologise and “appropriately compensate” him. This followed Trump’s threat to sue for $1 billion.

White House

No doubt the editing was shoddy, but we live in a media landscape drowning in genuine disinformation from the right - and in that the White House and the US administration excel anyone else. So how come this specific ‘technical failure’ became a weapon? Because the BBC’s real crime in the eyes of the conservative wing of the ruling class is not that it is too ‘leftist’, but that it remains attached to the old neoliberal consensus.

The search for blood started by the Torygraph was naturally supported by the Daily Mail, The Sun, etc, which have campaigned for decades to dismantle the BBC. We also had the usual rightwing cabal - Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Tommy Robinson, etc - falling over themselves to prove their loyalty to their American masters.

And the BBC, as always, has complied. It is an institution geared for submission. Under Davie - let us not forget a former Tory candidate in local elections and later vice-president of marketing and franchise at PepsiCo - the BBC had already accelerated its own managed decline. His time will be remembered as one defined by brutal cuts, a crackdown on staff “virtue-signalling” in late 2020 when the BBC introduced stricter guidelines on social-media participation for its staff - especially journalists and those in news/current affairs. This was the process used to force sports presenter Gary Lineker to resign, after he dared express opposition to Israeli genocide.

The entire narrative of a ‘woke’, ‘leftist’ BBC is a well-rehearsed and calculated lie - a smokescreen to force the broadcaster to cower. The truth is the BBC’s upper echelons are dominated by Tory grandees and capitalists. For example:

Richard Sharp: former chairman, Tory donor and the banker who facilitated a secret loan for Boris Johnson.
John McAndrew: current director of programmes for BBC News, who was poached directly from GB News.

Senior presenters have included:

Andrew Neil: a Murdoch-era hatchet man who chaired the hard-right Spectator, while a BBC flagship presenter, before founding the reactionary GB News.
Nick Robinson, who was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1980s ...

Another important figure is Robbie Gibb, former head of communications for Theresa May, who has been described as an “active agent of the Conservative Party” inside the BBC. Alan Rusbridger, writing in Prospect, tells us:

Sir Robbie is a stickler for what he regards as impartiality. He is reported to have told Newsnight staff that if they “wanted to peddle their own agendas, they should ‘get stuffed and leave’.”

But he is a curious figure to have emerged as the ultimate arbiter of impartiality at our venerable public service broadcaster. There is, he would be the first to admit, nothing impartial about his politics: until 2019 he was the official Downing Street spokesman for Theresa May’s Tory government. He was subsequently appointed to the BBC role by Boris Johnson’s government - reportedly at the behest of a close friend of his of whom there is, mysteriously, no official trace.

And then there is the opaque and unexplained business of how he came to own the Jewish Chronicle, the BBC’s implacable critic. According to Companies House, Sir Robbie has, since April 2020, been the sole owner and director of the JC - the same organ whose long campaign for a “parliamentary inquiry” into the BBC’s coverage of Jews and Israel ended in “victory” in late 2022.¹

This blue-blooded guardian of ‘truth’ acts as the political police of the airwaves, ensuring output never fundamentally challenges capitalist hegemony or British imperialism, as witnessed in the reporting of more than two years of genocide in Gaza.

Presumably he played a role in approving the Panorama programme accusing Corbyn’s Labour Party of anti-Semitism, which should have been investigated . According to Jewish Voice for Liberation, two Jewish women, Helen Marks and Rica Bird, who were falsely accused of anti-Semitism in the 2019 BBC Panorama documentary, ‘Is Labour anti-Semitic?’, finally had their letter printed in February 2023 in The Guardian refuting claims made in the programme - particularly an incident in which they were said to have asked a Labour investigator, Ben Westerman, “Are you from Israel?” as evidence of their ‘anti-Semitism’.²

Marks and Bird provide a recording and transcript proving that no such question was ever asked³ - they had simply asked which local party branch he was from. Both women are Jewish - a fact omitted from the programme. They note that BBC producers never gave them a chance to respond and continue to stand by their false claims.

The article also highlights wider criticisms of the Panorama episode, including:

Editing emails from Jeremy Corbyn’s team to suggest they defended anti-Semitism.
Misrepresenting testimony and cases.
Findings in the Forde Report and Al Jazeera’s ‘Labour files’ that exposed bias and distortion.

JVL argues that, given these accumulated challenges, the UK broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, should reopen its investigation into the programme.

Before the sensational resignation, social media was full of posts showing a three-year-old clip from BBC’s Middle East news editor, Raffi Berg, admitting his admiration from Mossad.⁴ According to the recording, “Mossad makes him proud and give him goosebumps”.

According to Canary, internal BBC sources allege a culture of “extreme fear” among staff, when it comes to reporting critically on Israel, and that Berg has strong influence over how Israel-Palestine stories are framed. Now that would have been worth a resignation by senior BBC staff, as opposed to what we got.

We have also had the BBC cowardly spiking its own documentary, Gaza: doctors under attack, for fear of offending the Israeli state. This is hardly impartiality: it is complicity. Coverage of Gaza is systematically skewed, always platforming Israeli lies to provide ‘balance’ for a settler-colonial massacres. Even reporting on events like the New York mayoral race is bent to include a Republican ‘perspective’, where none is relevant, artificially ‘normalising’ the far right.

The rank-and-file BBC journalist is typically a liberal centrist (occasionally a Labourite). So the idea of a Marxist cell pulling BBC strings is a far-right fantasy. Some BBC journalists and editors that I have come across really do believe they are ‘impartial’ - citing the fact that they are attacked by both the right and the left as ‘proof’. However, the reality is that like many others they are still living and thinking in terms of what liberal bourgeoisie has defined as ‘human rights’, the ‘rule of law’, etc, completely unconscious of the fact that that era is gone for ever (if it ever existed). Those I meet in the BBC World Service criticise Trump’s blatant colonialist, racist, misogynist language, yet they do not seem to realise that, when a Labour prime minister in the UK or a centrist president in France obeys Trump, we are no longer talking of a rogue individual or an isolated US administration: we are talking of a global shift to the right, which is increasingly colouring and shifting real-world politics in the so-called west.

Worst of times

You could argue that the best of times for the BBC was the few months before the Iraq war of 2003. The corporation showed itself independent of the George Bush/Tony Blair agenda in terms of depicting Saddam Hussein as not just a dictator, which he was, but someone in possession of weapons of mass destruction - chemical and at times even possibly nuclear weapons.

The reporters and editors involved in investigative programmes questioning Tony Blair’s lies were subsequently sacked. Probably that started a whole new period - a downward slide far away from challenging the status quo. None of the people who were expressing those opinions, writing about the lies put forward by Blair and others, were leftwing. However, what they wrote was largely correct, and now there can be no doubt about the veracity of their broadcasts - yet they had to go.

The forced resignation of Greg Dyke and the subsequent sacking of the reporters involved started a whole new regime in the BBC, where ‘impartiality’ meant you could not state facts that might upset the status quo! One could argue that the most important item in any claim of impartiality must be a fact-based statement. So, when an international inspector tells you that Hussein has no chemical weapons - a fact that was subsequently proved to be correct in post-war Iraq - this is not the issuing of an opinion: it is a statement of fact. And therefore it must be accepted as such.

Gaza bias

The same is true of Gaza. When United Nations investigators report that what is happening is genocide, this becomes just another politically biased opinion. When the medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that over 180,000 Palestinians were killed up to February 2025, this too becomes a mere opinion.

At a seminar in the University of Oxford, I asked a relatively senior BBC editor: how come, before the Iraq war, the BBC showed relative bravery in exposing the Bush/Blair war agenda, while in reporting on Gaza we witness a complete subservience to the US/UK/Israeli line? I added that I believed the resignations and sackings of 2023 created a level of ‘small c’ conservatism. His reply was: Saddam Hussein did not have a lobby, but Israel has a large, powerful one. And, in some ways, that defines where they are: the size and power of a lobby influences editorial decisions; the bigger it is the more powerful it is. How can anyone claim this is ‘impartiality’?

The real bias is the suffocating, institutional deference to a now defunct liberal bourgeois democracy and as a result to capital and the state.

The current scandal proves something even more sinister: that US imperial power can reach directly into the British national broadcaster and demand that heads must roll. The BBC’s credentials for covering the White House were likely on the line. The British state, a pathetic subsidiary of the American empire, transmitted the order. The BBC, as always, obeyed.

Having said all that, I remain an avid consumer of many of the cultural, educational and entertainment programmes the BBC produces. There can be no doubt that the commercially driven broadcasters proposed by the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express would replace such programming with superficial, profit-oriented nonsense, giving full and uncritical airtime to extreme rightwing opinion. For all the BBC’s faults, we must also condemn the right’s attempts to shut down the corporation. But if we want the truth we cannot rely on a ‘better’ BBC. No, we need our own militant, working class, full spectrum alternative media.