Trump threatens to sue the BBC
The BBC is under fire again after the resignation of its Director General Tim Davie. US President Trump has now threatened to sue for one billion dollars in damages following allegations that the British broadcaster misleadingly edited a speech he gave shortly before the storming of the Capitol for one of its documentary programmes. What does the crisis say about the BBC and public service media?
Deep-rooted culture of superiority
De Telegraaf's UK correspondent Joost van Mierlo accuses the broadcaster of arrogance:
“It is complacency that has led to the biggest scandals. With the resignation of Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness, the BBC seems to be acknowledging its own responsibility for the first time. However, the BBC is so big, the culture of superiority such a hallmark of the organisation and the employees so much part of a socio-cultural elite that looks down on the opinions of 'normal people' that it will take years to change this. But you have to start somewhere.”
Don't be intimidated by the powerful
The BBC must continue its important work undaunted, counters Dagens Nyheter:
“Like all established media outlets, the BBC must stick to facts and real circumstances, report and reproduce them, and make them understandable. If mistakes are made, they must be admitted and corrected, and measures must be taken to prevent them from happening again. It must be accepted that political actors have opinions about reporting, but just because participants in the debate on the right or left are dissatisfied with the facts it can't just try to accommodate them to create some kind of false balance. And it mustn't be intimidated by the threats of those in power – whether they are politicians in your own country or the most powerful man in the world.”
Rein in the polarisation
De Standaard sees public broadcasting as a whole under threat in these polarised times:
“The fact that the BBC has ended up mired in scandal is a very dangerous development. It poses the question of whether public broadcasters can remain recognisable and attractive to society as a whole in a polarised environment. We can only hope that this is the case. The alternative would be a media landscape that is as divided as society itself, which would further fuel polarisation.”
More transparency and self-criticism needed
Public broadcasting is no easy task in the UK, Der Standard points out:
“BBC journalists are under enormous pressure every day. Not only do they face the normal job of every journalist - to do their research thoroughly, judge fairly, choose their words with care - but they also have a duty to defend the reputation of their employer, which quite rightly commands respect all over the world. All too often they fall into the trap of immediately viewing any criticism of their craft as a devastating blow to public broadcasting. Instead, they should admit their mistakes quickly and publicly.”
Smug liberal-progressive viewpoint
Echo24 takes a critical view of public service media:
“The BBC has long been targeted among other things for its one-sided and distorted reporting on events in the Middle East, and its hostile and emotionally uncontrolled criticism of US President Donald Trump. ... All of this is already part of the standard arsenal not only of most public service media, but also of many mainstream media outlets in Europe and America that openly profess a smug liberal-progressive view of society. However, this puts them at odds with the worldview of a large part of their viewers and readers, as confirmed by data from the renowned news agency Reuters, which shows a steady decline in trust in the established media.”
Attacks on the press reach Europe
The battle for media supremacy in the United States has reached the other side of the Atlantic, says the taz:
“What it's actually about is almost irrelevant. ... It comes as no surprise that, alongside the Daily Mail, it was mainly the Daily Telegraph that lambasted Davie and the BBC. The paper is about to be taken over by the US consortium RedBird Capital, in which Trump's major supporter Larry Ellison has a stake. Ellison has already bought up Paramount in the US, is in the process of bringing CBS into line and wants to turn the Telegraph into a right-wing New York Times. For the BBC, it's now all or nothing.”
Auntie will be mourned
Corriere della Sera fears the Americanisation of the British media:
“The right wing in London now smells blood: It has always regarded the public broadcaster as a bastion of the left that would sooner or later have to be brought to heel. ... If the BBC emerges weakened from this affair, the British media (and cultural) landscape will take another step towards Americanisation - towards a polarised public sphere in which increasingly partisan newspapers and TV stations face off against each other ... Then the time will come to mourn Auntie, as the old BBC is affectionately known.”
BBC worth defending
The broadcaster has by no means lost its raison d'être, writes The Irish Times:
“Large public broadcasters are hardly without flaws. Accusations of groupthink, complacency and overspending are sometimes justified. But the BBC remains one of the great achievements of the post-imperial British state. Its output is trusted by tens of millions at home and many more abroad, and it has long served as a model for broadcasters elsewhere. To dismantle it would constitute an act of extraordinary self-harm. Public service broadcasters everywhere must innovate and adapt to a transformed media environment. But the principles on which they were founded are still worth defending.”
A political campaign against the media
The real goal here is to weaken the BBC as an independent institution, The Guardian suspects:
“The row obscures the context that explains what is, at the heart of the matter, a political campaign against the BBC that could act as a textbook example of how to confuse and undermine the kind of journalism that is, at the very least, aiming for impartiality in a sea of spin and distortion. ... Each criticism of BBC coverage comes from the anti-progressive culture-war playbook. ... Trump's threat of a lawsuit against the BBC follows his successful cowing of the US media, with a succession of commercial broadcasters agreeing to pay damages on the flimsiest of charges. The BBC must be independent of government and political interference.”
One-sided reporting undermines trust
The Times sees the criticism of the BBC as justified and calls for more impartiality:
“If the publicly funded BBC proves as easily captured by partisan ideology as the next institution, the argument for it disintegrates. … The BBC's output bias on a contested subject like sex and gender is not just the product of 'mistakes', but of cultural and institutional capture. The BBC needs new leadership that toughens up its impartiality guidelines and makes clear that there is no place at the corporation for staff who try to undermine them, and therefore public trust in the whole BBC.”