In the chapter of Miriam O’Callaghan’s memoir devoted to the scandals that piled up at RTÉ in 2023, the presenter makes a comment about the fallout that seems extra-pertinent in a week in which the BBC has become the subject of an unprecedented transatlantic assault.
“I never realised just how much some politicians detested RTÉ,” she writes of that tense summer, when its corporate governance outrages and failures led to something of a political free-for-all, with seemingly few lines of attack off-limits at televised Oireachtas committee showdowns.
This year’s sense of near permacrisis at the BBC hinges on a very different batch of controversies, but that feeling of it being open season on a public service broadcaster is a familiar one.
Tim Davie, who resigned as director general of the BBC on Sunday, will have been all too aware when he took the job of just how much certain politicians detest the BBC. So, too, will many of the 21,000 people who work for the organisation.
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Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has never made a secret of his enmity. Former prime minister Boris Johnson, when in office, perpetuated the narrative that the BBC was biased against Brexit – his flagship political project – while simultaneously threatening to scrap the licence fee that underpins its existence. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has not exactly stood up for the broadcaster, insisting that it has had “serious questions to answer for a long time”.
These individuals make even the most vociferous RTÉ detractors seem like its best pals.
In the last two years, meanwhile, US president Donald Trump has sued broadcasters ABC and CBS, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. It is hardly too much of a twist that this “litigious fellow”, as BBC chairman Samir Shah dubbed him, is now threatening to sue the BBC for “no less” than $1 billion. Indeed, he told Fox News he has an “obligation” to sue. That’s just the kind of guy he is.
Trump’s latest legal activity centres on a Panorama programme from October 2024 that senselessly spliced together two separate excerpts of the speech he made on January 6th, 2021, making it seem as if he explicitly incited the failed insurrection at the US Capitol. Trump’s lawyers maintain that his supporters rioted of their own accord.
The bigger surprise here is that BBC management did and said nothing about the Panorama edit even after the problem became apparent and even after Trump, emboldened by victory, set about instilling a culture of fear among US-owned media companies.
And yet, in the last few days, it feels as if the curtains have been pulled back on both the degree of hostility that the BBC faces from the right of the political spectrum and the extent to which its gloating opponents are willing to twist the knife.
Farage could scarcely contain his glee on Monday, declaring that the BBC had been “institutionally biased for decades” and that the Panorama programme had been tantamount to “election interference”.
That Trump might ultimately find it difficult to prove in court that his reputation was damaged doesn’t mean the situation isn’t already an expensive nightmare for the BBC – one that it could have avoided.
There are no more painful wounds than self-inflicted ones. The BBC has been on an underwhelming streak of own goals and errors of judgment, each of which has been exacerbated by missteps in how they were handled in the aftermath. After the leak of an internally commissioned (though still contentious) memo to the Daily Telegraph, the Panorama incident claimed a key scalp with the resignation of BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness. It also became the final straw for a battle-weary Davie.
Still, the BBC was independently found as recently as June to be the most trusted and widely-used news source in the UK. It seems likely that a significant portion of its loyal, licence fee-paying audience will view Trump’s response as opportunistic bullying. If the BBC pays up to make him go away, the capitulation could end up causing greater reputational harm than any Panorama edit.
On Tuesday, Davie, now in a caretaker role, used language that reflects the peril it finds itself in, referring in a video call with staff to “enemies” of the BBC and the “weaponisation” of its mistakes.
Shah, sitting beside him, did shoot down as “fanciful” suggestions that there had been a coup from within masterminded by Johnson’s appointee to the board, Robbie Gibb, a former BBC editor with ties to the Conservatives. But media scrutiny of Gibb has intensified, with some staff letting it be known that they are unhappy about his role, adding internal schisms to the BBC’s inbox of woes.
The BBC’s predicament should be watched closely by the board and management of RTÉ, and not just because there is a chance that director general Kevin Bakhurst could up sticks and return to his former employer.
Bakhurst told the Irish Independent he has “a job to do here at RTÉ” and he is “really enjoying” it, which hasn’t stopped his name being mentioned in connection with the BBC role by the Telegraph, with trade publication Deadline also listing him among its “dark horses”.
In truth, the leading candidates for the BBC top job have all run media organisations much larger than RTÉ. It is a measure of the foreign-affairs gap between Ireland and Britain that the Telegraph thinks it would be RTÉ’s threat in September to boycott the next Eurovision Song Contest if Israel takes part that would raise questions “about whether he [Bakhurst] would be the right fit for the BBC”.
Beyond these high-level personnel issues, what is happening in London serves as a broad cautionary tale. In a media company of any scale, editorial mistakes are inevitable. It is why they happen, and how they are dealt with, that matters.
Ignoring a swell of criticism or adopting a head-in-sand approach rarely works out well, but neither do survival tactics based on appeasement. If a political party decides it wants to destroy public service broadcasting, it will seize upon anything and everything in its effort to do that.
As RTÉ knows from its own history, errors can come from anywhere. Nevertheless, it is notable that both the Panorama programme and Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, a BBC documentary pulled in February after it emerged that its child narrator was the son of a Hamas official, were made by external production companies.
The independent sector makes some brilliant programming. That is not in dispute. But for RTÉ, poised to shut down its documentary unit as part of a wider scaling back of in-house production, these incidents highlight the importance of retaining full editorial oversight of sensitive content. When something goes awry, after all, it will be the broadcaster, not its supplier, that bears the brunt. (October Films, the company that made Panorama, has since said it was a member of BBC staff who was responsible for the speech edit.)
Davie, who is far from the first BBC director general to resign amid controversy, denied that his was “an impossible job” by design. But in a febrile climate in which any cock-up can be swiftly interpreted as conspiracy, a public service broadcaster needs to have systems in place to defend itself robustly, so that not every blip leaves it floundering in chaos or paralysed by fear of the next backlash.
It fell to Labour’s Lisa Nandy, the UK’s culture secretary, to urge MPs in Westminster to remember there is a “fundamental difference” between raising serious concerns about editorial failings and launching a sustained attack on a “national institution”.
That “national institution” wording implicitly acknowledges that some missiles being flung at the BBC originate from outside the UK. This is the most extraordinary dimension of a story that is far from over.
