THE post of Director General of the BBC has, over the past two decades, become a poisoned chalice.
Greg Dyke was forced out in 2004 by editorial failings in coverage of the war in Iraq; George Entwhistle was disgraced by his mishandling of the Jimmy Savile fall-out in 2012; Tony Hall was engulfed in 2020 by his allegedly dishonest handling of the Panorama interview of Princess Diana, as chronicled in the book Dianarama, and most recently Tim Davie was pushed into resignation in November last year because of gross editorial failings which led to a $5billion (£3.74billion) libel claim against the BBC by President Donald Trump.
Davie’s dramatic exit – he finally leaves at the end of March – has crystallised what is starkly evident to audiences: the BBC’s gravest problem is that its editorial processes are hugely inadequate. Further, that a large and growing proportion of the public no longer trusts the BBC to be impartial or to reflect accurately Great Britain and its values.
Into that breach now steps Matt Brittin. Who? The appointment by the BBC Board – though not yet fully confirmed – is being framed in some quarters as bold. Here is a man forged in the world of Google, who rose to become its president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is steeped in the dynamics of the digital age and obviously plugged into the tectonic shift in audience behaviour towards platforms such as YouTube and Netflix. The BBC is naturally deeply worried by such threats and keen to adapt to the fast-changing media environment. Younger audiences are drifting away; the old certainties of scheduled broadcasting are dissolving; the Corporation fears being left behind.
But Brittin’s appointment suggests a profound – and potentially catastrophic – misdiagnosis of what is wrong.
The BBC’s crisis is not primarily digital. It is editorial. In that context, the most striking fact about Brittin is not what he has done, but what he has not. He has no background in broadcast journalism, no experience as an editor, and no track record in the culture of a newsroom. The BBC Director General is not merely a chief executive: he is, in effect, editor-in-chief of the most powerful news organisation in the country, if not the world. To appoint someone with no grounding in that discipline is astonishing. It goes to the heart of whether the BBC understands its own predicament.
Across almost every major area of public controversy – Brexit, Net Zero, the trans debate, and coverage of conflicts such as Gaza – substantial sections of the audience believe that the BBC has an axe to grind. Bucketfuls of systematic research, which the Corporation refuses to even consider, spell out the extent of the rot. Alternative perspectives are either marginalised or rubbished. One can argue about the fairness of each individual criticism. What cannot be dismissed is their cumulative force.
This massive loss of confidence in BBC integrity is strongly evidenced. Opinion surveys have shown that a majority of the public do not trust the BBC to be impartial, with only a minority believing that it fulfils its core obligation of neutrality.
Yet the BBC complaints process to address such concerns is, in practice, almost entirely ineffective. Over the eight years of this Charter period, News-watch research has shown the BBC has upheld just 38 complaints relating to impartiality out of a total complaints volume running into more than two million. At the same time, Ofcom research has shown overwhelming dissatisfaction with the complaints process itself, with large majorities of respondents expressing little or no confidence in its fairness. Complainants encounter a system that is opaque, defensive and circular: the BBC assesses its own output, on its own terms, and almost invariably finds itself in the right.
External oversight by Ofcom, introduced at the start of the current Charter, has done little to alter that picture. Interventions have been rare, narrowly framed, and confined to individual programmes rather than systemic patterns. The BBC is, to a remarkable degree, judge and jury in its own cause.
Worse still, complacency and head-burying are now entrenched in defence of this chronically dysfunctional system. In December, following an internal editorial review conducted in the wake of the Prescott dossier and other mounting criticisms, the BBC Board chose explicitly to maintain the status quo. Move along there, nothing to see. Despite the massive accumulation of evidence pointing to systemic problems in both editorial culture and complaints handling, it concluded that existing processes were adequate and required no substantive reform. That decision amounted to a doubling down on the very structures that have produced the current crisis.
It is against this background that the cultural dimension of Brittin’s appointment becomes relevant. As former BBC producer and news executive Robin Aitken reported this week, his only media experience is in strongly left-leaning publications. His media-related career began in the late 1990s as head of digital strategy with the Trinity Mirror group. At the beginning of last year, he was appointed a non-executive director of the Guardian Media Group – surely now a conflict of interest. That does not, in itself, disqualify him, but it does matter in an institution already widely perceived as being strongly left-leaning. The BBC does not need a leader who slots into its existing worldview; it needs one who can rigorously challenge it from a position of strength, ability and experience. Dyke, Entwhistle, Hall and Davie all failed because they ducked out on that task.
Here, some insight from those who have worked with Brittin is illuminating. He is described as highly intelligent, ambitious and politically astute, with a strong awareness of hierarchy and status. He could be personally charming when required, but also projected a sense – shared by those around him – that he and his team were operating at a level above the wider organisation. That kind of leadership can be highly effective in corporate environments. But it can also foster a culture that is internally cohesive and sharply cut off from the real world.
And that is precisely where he may fail.
Meanwhile, the political context is shifting in ways that raise the stakes still further. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, who is in charge of BBC Charter renewal, has suggested that the next renewal might become permanent, likening the Corporation to the NHS as a national institution to be protected indefinitely. If that were to happen without fundamental reform of accountability, it would entrench the very system that has allowed these problems to develop: a powerful public body, funded by a compulsory levy, operating with minimal effective external scrutiny.
In that light, the central question facing Brittin becomes unavoidable. What is the new Director General for? Is he there to reposition the BBC within a global digital marketplace, competing with Netflix and adapting to the logic of Google? Or is he there to restore trust in the BBC as an impartial national broadcaster, accountable to the public that funds it?
The two tasks are not the same. One is about survival in a changing media economy. The other is about legitimacy and trust in a democratic society.
Brittin may be well equipped to address the first. There is, as yet, little evidence that he has been chosen to confront the second. And until that changes – until impartiality is treated by the BBC not as a slogan but as a discipline, and accountability as a major necessity – the poisoned chalice will remain exactly that.