There’s a hilarious scene in Casablanca when the Nazis order Rick’s Café to be shut down on any pretext, and the morally flexible prefect of police, Captain Renault, says: “I am shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on here,” before pocketing his own earnings with a sotto voce thank you. Much like Renault, we were also shocked—shocked—to learn that the BBC is not the fount of unbiased information that we were promised.
For those living under a rock (or who think the acronym stands for something else), the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Director-General Tim Davie and its news chief Deborah Turness have resigned after numerous scandals, the biggest of
which was splicing a Donald Trump speech that changed what he had said. Now, it’s remarkable that one needs to splice Trump’s speech at all, because he is a human speech generator who will eventually say whatever you want him to say.
The current outrage can largely be divided into four categories:
- Splicing Donald Trump’s speech to change the meaning.
- Blatant anti-Israel slant, which included BBC Arabic coverage that read like Hamas fan mail (and employing journalists who were almost embedded with said organisation).
- Blatant pro-trans fixation, that included censuring a journalist for saying “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people,” getting rid of journalists who questioned the gender-identity coverage, and downplaying stories that might make pro-trans groups look bad.
- Personnel problems, like hiring a paedophile news anchor and Gary Lineker whose reasoning skills (comparing the UK’s asylum policy to 1930s Germany) aren’t on par with his footballing or punditry skills.
Now my liberal brethren have found several reasons for said problems, including an internal coup and a joint operation conducted by the Holy Trinity of Global Conservative Forces: the Tories, Trump, and the Telegraph. Now liberal fantasies aside, the only real question, as Camus would ask, is why did the BBC give in right now?
Because anyone who has watched Yes Minister knows there’s no question of the BBC giving in to government pressure, which, to be fair, is non-existent under a Labour government led by Keir Starmer.
Nor is it the Beeb’s first rodeo. Many years ago, it was the BBC’s wholesale whitewashing of genocide that
forced Frederick Forsyth to throw in the towel as a journalist and decide to pen extremely accurate thrillers instead.
So why did they suddenly fold?
The first is obviously that Donald Trump is back at the White House, making everyone who criticised him kiss his ring, and the WENA cannot do anything
except call him “Daddy.” In that climate, where the UK and Europe are more dependent on Uncle Sam’s largesse than ever, you cannot have a state broadcaster putting out fake videos angering the glucose guardian, as Gen Z would lovingly call him.
The rules-based liberal international order, which—like the Holy Roman Empire—has always been rather loosely named, has been replaced by spheres of influence where Europe no longer has any. The world has lurched rightward; ironic, really, that this happened after the removal of Chomsky’s levers of mass-controlled media, only to be replaced by the algorithmic hysteria of social media.
But there’s also a deeper reason: the age of woke quackery has finally gone the way of the dodo. The pendulum that swung too far towards moral grandstanding and performative empathy is now snapping back with a vengeance. The BBC, long the cathedral of progressive orthodoxy, is discovering that the audience it once lectured no longer kneels at its altar. Its “view from nowhere” journalism has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.
Add to that the fact that BBC’s finances are in free fall. Licence fee cancellations have crossed 300,000 households this year, commercial revenues have stagnated, and the once-mighty public broadcaster is running operating losses in the hundreds of millions. Its newsrooms are shrinking, its influence waning, and its audience distracted by YouTube channels that produce sharper analysis at one-hundredth the cost.
And when the money runs out, the myth runs out too.
And all this is happening in a Britain that is BINO: British in name only. The kind of fantasia that existed in Forsyth-Kipling-Archer-Fleming novels is long gone. The Albion today is largely immaterial—a theme park of nostalgia powered by age-old institutions pretending to matter. The monarchy, the Parliament, and the BBC all exist in a state of suspended animation: technically alive, spiritually embalmed.
The BBC, in the end, is the vestige of a bygone era—an empire of microphones built on imperial certitude—clinging on far longer than it should. Its fall isn’t just a media story; it’s a national metaphor. For once, the Beeb isn’t reporting the decline of British influence. It is the decline.