Murder at the BBC
With his little hatchet...
This is an extended version of a piece written earlier this week for the Observer online. It has an extra-pissy footnote.
The murder is committed
Four weeks ago members of the BBC’s board received a letter from a former part-time independent editorial advisor, Michael Prescott. Its contents and tone suggested that Prescott, one of two advisors whose term had ended in the summer, probably intended it for public consumption and the board will have known that the clock was ticking on its publication, most likely in a BBC-averse newspaper. The board’s failure to agree a strategy of response before one of their number, or Mr Prescott himself, cut the Damoclean string has led to the third Director General in succession leaving his post prematurely.
Mr Prescott’s role was the product of the Serota Review set up in the wake of the Martin Bashir affair. Serota recommended a new Editorial Guidance and Standards Committee, and with it role was created for two new independent advisors. Applications were invited and two appointments made, of whom Prescott, a consultant who had left journalism 20 years earlier, was one.
To service the committee a Senior Editorial Advisor was appointed after what was described to me as a “campaign” run by board member Sir Robbie Gibb, who had been knighted for services to the Conservative party in 2019. Gibb “wanted a research advisor to look into questions he was being asked”, I was told. Given Gibb’s political background it was hardly likely that he was going to be talking much to Corbynistas or Greens about their BBC concerns.
The appointee for this role was a highly respected former Newsnight reporter David Grossman, whose work is constantly and selectively referenced in Prescott’s letter. And it was something Grossman himself noticed that was the proximate cause of this most recent BBC debacle. In Washington covering the aftermath of the 2020 election and the subsequent January 6th attempt to overturn it by force, Grossman was one of the few Brits who had watched in full the Trump speech that preceded the attack. Though not a single complaint was lodged about the October 2024 Panorama on the prospects for a second Trump term, by January this year Grossman had flagged the “dodgy” edit of Trump’s speech to the EGSC.
The news executives replied at the May meeting arguing that such edits were unremarkable and weren’t misleading. Prescott, Gibb and several other BBC editorial employees disagreed, in my opinion correctly. Even if the responsibility of Trump for the January 6th riot should be clear to the neutral observer (though Prescott seems to dispute it) and his actions on that day seen as an indicator of what his presidency might mean (by then he had already described the rioters as “heroes” and subsequently pardoned all of them), the edit was misleading and editorially indefensible. By the beginning of last week, the board was preparing to apologise. They were pre-empted.
The poor, traduced Donald Trump
But Prescott went way further than the edit. His letter charges that the BBC’s entire coverage of the 2024 election was biased against Trump. And his objections range from the debateable to the downright partisan. His scruple over the BBC’s reporting of Trump’s violent language about his Republican enemy, Liz Cheney, seems, in the light of the Charlie Kirk murder, highly dubious. Prescott argues that BBC News put too much emphasis on the passage in the single Trump/Harris debate where Trump repeated a racist urban myth, propagated by his running mate JD Vance, that pets were being eaten by Haitian migrants. I think reasonable people can be forgiven for agreeing with the BBC on that one.
Or take this from Prescott: “In covering Trump’s legal wrangles during the campaign… the BBC often failed to highlight that many US prosecutors are political appointees. This prevented viewers from having an understanding of the anti-Trump ‘lawfare’ at play during the presidential race.”
The use of “lawfare” as a neutral term by Prescott when it was in fact a partisan Republican charge, is indicative. Especially when he then goes on to object to BBC reports framing the abortion and family planning debates as being about “reproductive rights”. This is one-way inconsistency.
Prescott adds that “the balance of more in-depth programmes was “markedly anti Trump/pro Harris”. The internal review couldn’t find a single programme that looked more critically at Harris and her record than at Trump.”
Well no. Possibly because Harris hadn’t been president for four years, hadn’t sought to overturn the result of a fair election and hadn’t committed multiple misdemeanours, which (though Prescott won’t admit it) would almost certainly have led a neutral Congress to impeach him. Prescott might note that immediately after voting to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial in February 2021, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell argued that though Trump was “morally responsible” he shouldn’t be impeached because he had left office. It was now, said McConnell, a job for the criminal courts – or, as Michael Prescott might put it, “lawfare”.
Dogs not barking
This should give the reader an idea of the direction of the letter. As should what is not included. There is not a single word here about the BBC’s political, business, education, health, royalty, home affairs, climate change or crime coverage, or even Ukraine. For example, did Prescott ever think to ask whether the same objections that he raised over the treatment of Trump might be applied to the BBC’s treatment of Putin?
So Prescott zeroes in on the culture war plus Gaza agenda. Because these seem to be the things that bother him, not because these are all the things a conscientious advisor might be bothered by. And his methodology is problematic. He uses time frames when it suits his arguments (as in ‘during the time of this review) and then abandons them when it doesn’t. This gets him into the ludicrous situation of claiming that the BBC undercovers issue of asylum and the small boats because of some quibble about the “push notifications” on the online news feed in a particular week. Meanwhile the rest of us have watched day after day as the News itself has headlined boats, hostels and anti-migrant protests for months.
