The BBC Deserves to be Destroyed

Is it an Epstein Island flight log? A list of radical left-wing revolutionaries? Or tonight’s BBC programming schedule? These days, it’s hard to tell the difference.

The BBC has been at the centre of so many scandals that few would disagree its reputation is at an all-time low. Once considered the gold standard of journalism, it has become, for many, a byword for bias, hypocrisy, and institutional rot, from decades of partisan coverage to its shameful association with figures such as Jimmy Savile and Huw Edwards.

The most recent scandal hardly comes as a surprise. Earlier this month, the BBC found itself in the eye of a media hurricane when a documentary from its flagship current-affairs programme Panorama appeared to splice together two separate remarks by US President Donald Trump, delivered almost an hour apart, so that it appeared that he told his supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight, we fight like hell.” In truth, the two statements were distinct and contextually separated.

The fallout was swift. On 9 November 2025, the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie, announced his resignation, citing the controversy among other pressures. On the same day, the Head of BBC News and Current Affairs, Deborah Turness, also stepped down. Even the Chairman, Samir Shah, was forced into public contrition, calling the edit “an error of judgment”. To be a senior figure at the BBC is to live beneath the shadow of the sword of Damocles; the next scandal is always imminent.

President Trump has since threatened a $1 billion lawsuit, declaring, “I think I have an obligation to [sue them]; you can’t allow people to do that.” When asked whether he would tell the US president to drop his legal threat, Prime Minister Keir Starmer replied that he would “always stand up for a strong, independent BBC… where mistakes are made they do need to get their house in order and the BBC must uphold the highest standards, be accountable and correct errors quickly.” In other words, no.

This Trump episode joins a long line of controversies that have eroded public trust. Only months earlier, the Gary Lineker impartiality row exposed how selectively the BBC enforces its own standards. Lineker compared the government’s asylum policy to 1930s Germany, a clear breach of the corporation’s impartiality rules. Yet instead of sanctioning him, the BBC suspended him briefly before reinstating him amid an internal revolt from other presenters. Had a presenter made an equivalent right-leaning remark instead, their career would likely have been over. The handling of the situation made it clear to many that the rules do not apply equally.

Another scandal involving the Panorama show came with the Martin Bashir forgery scandal, concerning how the BBC secured its infamous 1995 interview with Princess Diana through falsified documents and deceit. An independent inquiry found the broadcaster had covered up the misconduct for decades, prioritising its reputation over telling the truth.

Look even further back and the list grows darker. The BBC’s mishandling of the Jimmy Savile investigation, described by Parliament as a “catastrophic failure”, remains an open wound in British cultural memory. Its coverage of the Falklands War saw Margaret Thatcher’s government accuse the corporation of treating Britain and Argentina as moral equals at the very moment British soldiers were dying in combat. Many began to ask, “Whose side is the BBC on?”

Across the decades, the pattern repeats: moral blindness, selective enforcement, bias, and at times a perverse obsession with appearing too impartial. Taken together, these episodes point to something deeper than simple human error or deliberate partisanship. They reveal that true impartiality is structurally impossible inside any organisation that both interprets and broadcasts reality. Journalism, by its nature, selects, frames, and emphasises, and those choices inevitably reflect the worldview of the people making them.

Psychology tells us as much. Humans are riddled with cognitive biases that steer thought and behaviour, often unconsciously. Even the most conscientious journalist, striving only to communicate truth, is still a hostage to these mental pitfalls. The Framing Effect leads us to draw different conclusions from identical information depending on its presentation; the Availability Heuristic makes us overvalue whatever comes most easily to mind. There are so many that avoiding them all is impossible.

Contrast this with the sciences, where epistemic humility is, at least in principle, built into the process. Hypotheses are tested, results replicated, and theories abandoned when evidence demands it. Even then, science suffers from the replication crisis, confirmation bias, and outright fabrication of data. If even the sciences struggle to remain objective, what hope is there for neutrality in the interpretive art of journalism?

The public, at least, seems to tacitly support this notion. A recent YouGov poll found that only 4% of Reform UK supporters, 17% of Conservatives, 27% of Labour voters, and 31% of Liberal Democrats believe that the BBC is unbiased. Those who insist otherwise tend to be left-leaning, which is telling in itself. As journalist Peter Hitchens noted on X, “My timeline is full of left-wing people saying how unbiased the BBC is.” Of course they are; when the bias works in your favour, impartiality feels real enough.

Government institutions, even when competently run, tend to lean leftward by default. Those who place their faith in state institutions are more likely to work within them, and so the ideological centre of gravity drifts accordingly. The historian Robert Conquest captured this dynamic perfectly in his Second Law of Politics: “Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

The BBC is no exception. It has become the embodiment of Conquest’s Law, a taxpayer-funded cathedral of progressive orthodoxy that still insists on calling itself “neutral”. But the façade is slowly cracking. The public, weary of hypocrisy and sanctimony, has stopped genuflecting. More and more people are less concerned with whether the BBC can recover its credibility and more with whether it deserves to survive at all.

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether true impartiality is even desirable. The myth of neutrality has long served as a moral shield for institutions like the BBC, allowing them to exert enormous cultural power while claiming to have none. Yet to interpret events is, inevitably, to take a position. The act of choosing what to show, what to omit, and how to frame it is inherently political, whether one admits it or not.

Honesty, no neutrality should be the journalistic ideal. The public is perfectly capable of discerning bias if given the information transparently. A journalist who says, “Here is my view, and here is my reasoning”, treats the audience as intelligent equals. A journalist who insists, “I am neutral”, while smuggling ideology through framing and omission, treats them as children. The former is honest bias; the latter is dishonest propaganda.

Ironically, the decline of the BBC and other legacy broadcasters has coincided with the rise of something far healthier: a new ecosystem of decentralised voices online. Independent journalists, podcasters, and video essayists openly state their perspectives and allow their audiences to judge their credibility. This model is messy, uneven, and often chaotic, but it is authentically pluralistic in a way mainstream media never was. The truth, when it emerges, does so through open competition between ideas, not from the sanctimony of a self-appointed moral authority in a London newsroom.

This shift mirrors the scientific principle of falsification: progress is made not by enforcing consensus, but by allowing competing hypotheses to clash in public view. The BBC’s claim to have been “the voice of balance” was once plausible, when access to information was limited. That world is gone. In the digital age, where anyone can publish and everyone can fact-check, the pretence of institutional impartiality feels archaic, a relic of an information monopoly that no longer exists.

Perhaps this is why public trust in the BBC continues to erode. People instinctively recognise when they are being patronised. The institution’s defenders still claim that, without it, Britain would descend into a swamp of misinformation. Yet the opposite may be true. The more the BBC insists on its own neutrality, the less believable it becomes, and the more the public turns toward voices that at least admit where they stand.

Bias is not a moral failing; it is an essential aspect of human nature. The only moral failing is to deny it. Until the BBC learns that lesson, it will remain a relic of a time when people thought the truth could belong to the state.