The Beeb Bleeds, the Telegraph Cheers, and Trump Claps From the Balcony

The people who always hated public broadcasting finally smell blood - and the BBC seems too tired and compromised to fight back.

Welcome to Bearly Politics - an independent publication where I prod politics, propaganda, and the occasional sacred cow until something interesting falls out. I’m The Bear, and today I’m wondering what exactly has happened to the BBC over the past week - and whether we should be worried about who benefits.

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Sunday mornings are usually when I tend to do the folding (not ironing though, that’s just one step of drudgery too far). While I do this, in the past, I would always have the BBC playing - specifically the Sunday morning politics programmes. When we first moved to the UK, Andrew Marr was the man asking the hard questions and, to my husband’s consternation (he is not a political creature - at all), I would sit and sort the socks while watching ministers squirm.

Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash

This particular habit stopped probably about a year and a half ago. The Sunday morning show, now led by Laura Kuennsberg, had started feeling… soft¹. Weird. Tory ministers would swan onto my telly for what would increasingly feel like a nice catch up over a coffee with Kuennsberg instead of a microscopic vivisection - while any voice on the left would be relentlessly scrutinised.

That’s the personal context that I’d like to use to set the scene on this piece - because what I felt over the past week or so with the drip-drip-drip of news coming in has felt a bit like watching a whale beach itself. It felt like the BBC was flailing on the shingle, surrounded by a chorus of photographers and well-meaning onlookers, all shouting ever more contradictory advice about how to save, fix, sell or fillet it.

It’s all happened it seems. Tim Davie has resigned and Deborah Turness followed suit. A leaked memo said deeply serious things about editing decisions and bias. The Telegraph playing a major role². The usual suspects and voices on the right roar. The bright orange geriatric gameshow host does a little jig on his social network and calls yet more journalists corrupt - and so the story kept unfolding.

I’ll lay my cards on the table early on here, because I can sense a few counter-arguments warming up already - the BBC has huge problems.

Massive ones.

It has somehow managed to balance itself half to death. It’s platformed Reform UK like it’s a novelty act that accidentally wandered into a constitutional convention and then couldn’t find the exit. It has managed, for years now, to mistake “both sides” for journalism by pitting racists and experts against each other on the same screen for the sake of fairness and has allowed a thousand panel-shows of performative thunder to stand in for actual honest-to-god reporting.

It watched passively as talented journalists and employees walk out the door - Maitlis, Sopel, Lewis and dozens of quiet reporting brains that you probably would never have heard of - because defending the work became harder than actually doing the work.

Worst of all, in the middle of genuine and serious safeguarding failures and historic scandals, it has responded with corporate throat clearing and bureaucratic fog so dense you need a lighthouse to find your way out of it.

I am in no way or form blind to any of this, and if you’re looking for a hymn and hagiography of the beeb, this is not the commentator you’re looking for.

And yet. And yet.

I find myself sniffing at the air, because there is a scent attached to this whole episode - a sharp, metallic tang - that makes me feel that more than just accountability is happening. Not fabricated - not that. Nor imaginary. But orchestrated - without a doubt. A curated and weaponised sequence of events³.

It’s the choreography of these events that has my back up and hackles raised - the timing of the leak, the steady drumbeat and drip-feed of stories coming from largely one direction and the speed with which the culture war accounts from both sides of the Atlantic have pounced. It’s the rapid translation of “editorial error” into “the entire institution is corrupt and must be remade in our image.”

If you’ve paid attention to how the outrage merchants and industry operates - Fox and GB News to Westminster Whatsapp to the pages of the Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Sun and back again - you’ll sense the choreography too, and it doesn’t feel like conspiracy to notice the patterns, to notice that there’s been a probing for soft spots for a while now.

The probers, over years have found it, and the BBC’s most vulnerable spot, in my mind at least, was once its greatest strength - the desire to be seen as fair by the people who will never extend the same fairness.

For a decade now, we’ve witnessed it flinch in the face of right-wing pressure - we’ve seen it duck, triangulate and issue apologies for things that didn’t require them, while refusing to say, in plain words, that some views are not “the other side” they are simply wrong⁴.

That constant flinching we’ve witnessed has left it a shrunken being - an organisation that, when the blow came this last week, had no muscle memory left for a fight.

The familiar phrases were instantly rolled out - “we take this very seriously,” “we’ll learn lessons” - an institutional reflex that it’s taken over the years of fainting politely on a chaise longue, and right into that fainting space charged the people who have always wanted one outcome above all else:

Obedience or oblivion⁵.

“I’m glad the US President and the rest of the world are seeing the BBC for what it is.

Its failure to tell the truth on everything from transgender ideology to economics to Gaza has done huge damage to politics and government in this country.

This should be the end of nationalised broadcasting.” Liz Truss, X, - 9 November 2025

We also can’t have this conversation without mentioning Reform UK - because that’s one of the spots where the rot has shown most visibly. Week after week after week, the party’s leadership (and hangers on) are given the velvet rope treatment - green rooms, headline slots, the “now tell us your vision”, and even a recent “What Would a Reform Government” treatment⁶ - while their polling numbers are treated like weather - an act of God rather than an artefact of immense media coverage and scrutiny.

Headline from BBC News, Published 5 November 2025, Accessed 9 November 2025.

When a Reform MP, Councillor, volunteer or whoever the case may be says something that is plainly racist, it gets framed as “controversial” or “provocative,” words that are used when someone wants to sound like a grown-up actively holding their nose.

When what Reform have said was demonstrably wrong - be that about immigration, crime, economics, immigration - we got “critics say” instead of an outright “they have made this up.”

Which is exactly the kind of supine editorial posture which doesn’t just weaken you once - it does so twice. First because you misinform and second because you put a signal out to bad actors that you are either incapable or unwilling to defend yourself if they decide to take your head off.

What these bad actors have learned was simple - all they needed to do was keep pushing, because eventually, the BBC will move for them.

The changes to Newsnight in November of 2023 is another piece of context for this parable - for years the programme did the unglamorous work that affects the weather, slow burning investigations, uncomfortable truths and yes, with the occasional misstep and mistake, because that’s the risk you take when you’re doing the real work.

But then came the savings drives. The Powerpoints and the terribly serious people who explained that audiences prefer interviews and debates. Out with the reporting muscle, and in with the slimmer, cheaper thing that looks like news if you squint your eyes and tilt your head.

I cannot overstate how important that decision was and what it signalled - the British Broadcasting Corporation no longer wished to set the agenda, and chose the role of moderator instead. For the British right who had dreamed for years of a BBC that stopped making the news and instead started taking dictation in the corner, that was the canary in the coalmine you were waiting for - and that canary has fully fallen off its perch now.

With all that in mind - lets consider the past week. The memo, the edit and the Saturday ending in resignations. All these accusations against the BBC do matter, and they will be tested, as they absolutely should be - but, notice the frame that was set on it nearly immediately.

Not an “error in a programme,” but rather a “proof of a rotten corporation and a captured newsroom.” Note just how quickly one documentary suddenly became the entire institution. How immediate that leap was from “this needs to be explained, quick fast” to “string them all up!”

In a media climate that was hale in health, you’d expect a proportional response - an internal investigation given some teeth. Transparency about editorial processes. Accountability for the people who are directly responsible. Boring technical conversations about how to stop this happening in the future.

Instead what we got was a thunderclap followed by the spectacle of a British broadcaster being celebrated by a vanquished enemy by the President of the United States.

All of these things should make each and every one of us sit up and pay attention - because whatever we think of the BBC, the moment that the Trump machine celebrates your decapitation, you can be almost certain you’ve found yourself smack bang in the middle of someone else’s story.

It’s also tempting - even to me - to feel a sense of schadenfreude at the series of events - the BBC has annoyed many of us for so long, that it feels… appropriate. I do get that.

The organisation has a list as long as my arm of some truly awful decisions - from the equivocation of Brexit realities under the guise of balance even well after the damage was clearly done, the “he said, she said” framing in which climate science or anything medicine related is discussed, the seemingly endless tolerance for politicians who treat interviews as a place to do stenography practice.

There are real, awful safeguarding failures - and very, very real victims - in the broadcasters long history, and the memory of these should, ideally, make the corporation completely intolerant of institutional defensiveness.

The danger though is, delighting in the BBC’s humiliation because it has failed us is largely like knocking down your own fence because the gate squeaks, which might be satisfying for five minutes, until you discover who enters your front garden.

I think what changed is not just the BBC - the environment it operates in is largely unrecognisable, and that environment is largely the politics of capture. A reminder that capture doesn’t always arrive clad to the teeth in jackboots - it can, and has, turned up grinning in a suit with friendly advice about “trust” and balance”, placing friendly people on panels and boards, steering budgets deftly away from unprofitable programming towards safe programming and “entertainment.”

“Neutrality,” it whispers, “is never telling the audience a politician has just lied.”

Editors are told, in friendly but firm terms, that the way to show impartiality is to platform the most extreme voice you can find, and then say a quick prayers that the centre looks like the centre once you’ve the Overton window three metres to the right.

And the moment that enough of that culture beds in, the follow up punch that follows is easy - a dossier here, a leak there, a scandal that’s framed as an existential reckoning and all of a sudden the people who wanted your back rigid and obedient, suddenly own your spine.

All in all, the resignation of Davie (though celebrated by me) and Turness don’t feel like accountability in action, because they don’t address two burning question I have. The first of which is whether their resignation actually remedies the issue. Does their departure result in stronger editorial processes, transparency, proper protection for journalists who challenge power - or is it theatrical, heads on spikes, new slogans, a “fresh start” that looks shiny but does keeps the pressures that caused the failures in the first place?

And the second is who, exactly, benefits? If the outcome of all the drama results in a newsroom too terrified to do its job, a leadership that reads the mood music for the country from The Telegraph’s leader column before it commissions a segment and a board with its own agenda, then we’ve not really fixed a problem - we’ve signed a deed of gift.

There is also - and please do forgive me for the tone here - a particularly British snobbery when it comes to the BBC that obscures and obfuscates this conversation. There is an expectation that the BBC should not just be better than commercial media (which in some cases, still, it may just be in other formats than the news), but more noble than human beings. We’ve built a religion around it - made it a sort of secular church which we use to wash our hands after getting them grimy from the internet.

The problem with that fantasy is that it does two things - it lets the broadcaster off in the good years, and crucifies it in the bad ones.

The truth is less deific - the BBC is a public utility that does culture at scale. It needs plumbers, engineers and boring procurement and, yes, journalists who are allowed to be excellent, but importantly, not above the rules.

The baying for its head in this latest round of crisis is coming from people who don’t want a better utility - they want the water switched off so private wells can be installed to charge what they want.

“Davie and Turness going must be the start of wholesale change.

The government needs to appoint somebody with a record of coming in and turning companies and their cultures around.

Preferably it would be someone coming in from the private sector who has run a forward facing business and understands PR.”

- Nigel Farage, X, 9 November 2025

The American angle of this all also troubles me greatly, because it feels like the broadcaster has now been dragged into a fight that it cannot win - because we don’t do things that way in the UK. Or at least we’re not supposed to. The outrage fusion reactor in the US depends on the existence of an enemy to punch out at - and the BBC has become the perfect victim for this - it’s prestigious enough to humiliate, British enough to exoticise and global enough to matter.

When you hear the celebrations come through from MAGA world at wounds inflicted on the BBC, you can guarantee that it’s not because they’ve developed a sudden interest in OfCom codes - it’s because very blow that they manage to land here, in our country, feeds a narrative there. A narrative that the West’s institutions are corrupt, the journalists are all liars and the only truth that can be trusted is that which is uttered by their Dear Orange Leader. It starts off with “the BBC lied about Trump,” but can so easily be turned into “the Electoral Commission stole your vote” - the method is chillingly similar.

So what is that I do want out of this, I hear you ask?

I don’t want absolution. Nor do I want a maudlin compilation of Planet Earth scenes set to a choir of unbroken voices. What I want is for the BBC to be worthy of defence by being defencible.

I would love nothing more than for its journalists to say when something is false without adding that damned question mark to appease a nervous comms director.

I want Newsnight back to the way it was - maybe not the exact brand, but at least the spirit of it, to make content that makes me feel not only entertained, but informed.

We need an impartiality policy that’s principled instead of frightened and that understands the difference in responsibility between hosting a debate and laundering conspiracy theories for easier consumption.

I want the specific people who made specific errors to be held accountable - not so the mob can get their red meat, but so the rest of us can see the gears turning without the grit in them and start trusting the machine again.

Alongside all of the above, I want us - the audience, press class, politicians - to recognise that we are actively being marched down a path. There’s a reason why a leak is timed the way it is, and there’s a reason why resignations are a way of leapfrogging the hard work of actually fixing things.

We should all be suspicious that culture warriors from across the Atlantic are suddenly fluent in the intricacies of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, and that above all, should be our biggest red flag.

It is possible to hold the BBC’s failings in one hand, and in the other hold the realisation that someone is taking advantage of those failings as a crowbar to get what they want.

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Thank you for reading to the end - I know this wasn’t a short stroll.

Bearly Politics runs on reader and community support - not venture capital, vanity or external funding. If you are in a position to do so, a paid subscription helps me keep poking the bear (and occasionally the BBC) with fewer compromises.

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1. I imagine somewhere in the BBC basement, there’s a single feral question that’s pacing in a cage, desperate for its keep to come get it again.

2. Because of course they are - if a meteor had to hit London, The Telegraph would find a way to blame it on migrants and the licence fee after all.

3. Or as the modern right likes to call it - a long weekend.

4. The most recent in my mind being when they apologised for Dr Krish Kandiah calling Robert Jenrick a Xenophobe - when he was most certainly being one.

5. Also workable as the Reform UK slogan - though they’ll likely have to argue which one to misspell first.

6. The only thing missing now is a drinks trolley and a lapel mic whispering “say something terrible, please - we need a programme trending”