LUKE FELTHAM: Fear and feebleness at the BBC

My unashamed addiction of the past few weeks has been the BBC. Specifically, the gossip and slander around the leadership crisis that has gripped the UK’s public broadcaster.

It’s a dirty habit. The issues are gravely serious, but following the media circus is intellectually no different from bingeing on The Real Housewives of Gqeberha. It’s reality TV at its most salacious.

The abridged version: last month the Daily Telegraph ran a series of articles revealing that a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary spliced together two different segments of a speech that US President Donald Trump gave ahead of the January 6 2021 Capitol storming.

The edit changed the meaning of his words, enhancing the impression that he was calling on his supporters to stage the attack. BBC director-general Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness resigned a week later as the backlash boiled over. Trump threatened to sue for $1bn. Crisis.

It is a bizarre spectacle for the outsider to watch, but behind the schadenfreude there are crucial lessons both we in the media and those who consume our work can learn from the debacle.

The idea that there is enough societal steam to overblow this mess in the first place is also admirable in its own perverse way. Yes, Brits are conscious that it is their fees that fund the BBC. But there is an underlying demand across the nation that the news giant operates within ethical, robust journalistic parameters.

It can only be a good thing to have that level of scrutiny watching over one of the biggest broadcasters and online publishers on the planet. But that is where the positivity ends.

It’s a ridiculous story all round. The Daily Telegraph has rather grandiosely framed its reporting as “whistleblowing”. In reality, the documentary was broadcast more than a year ago and was available to anyone to spot the mishap. That nobody did is testimony to how little impact it had. (And that it caused nowhere near $1bn of reputational damage).

Did the BBC err in passing the edit? Absolutely. Whether on video or in the written word, it is incumbent on the media to fairly represent their reporting subjects and their positions.

Should heads have rolled at the highest level? Absolutely not. Mistakes are as much a part of journalism as a pen and notepad. If the BBC was sure there was no malicious intent behind the edit it should have issued a correction and an apology and swiftly carried on.

It did not do that. For the days after the report first dropped, its leaders were stuck in place, gazing wide-eyed at the bright lights careering towards them. Whatever bureaucratic hold-ups there presumably were, its attempts at absolution came far too late. There is a culture of meek leadership that appears to be inculcated at the BBC regardless of who is calling the shots.

Not long after the two high-profile resignations the broadcaster in effect censored popular Dutch historian Rutger Bregman when he delivered the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures. The line that was cut described Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history”. No-one in the organisation is allowed to use it, not even the article reporting on Bregman’s exasperation.

Earlier in the year the BBC faced embarrassment and flak after the 13-year-old narrator in its aired documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was revealed to be the son of a Hamas official. Then too the broadcaster doubled down on caution. It retracted a second documentary already cleared for broadcast, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack (Medics Under Fire) — by most accounts a thoughtful, well-balanced film — ostensibly over concerns over impartiality.

The funny thing about controversy is that the harder you try to run away from it the more likely you are to court it. That’s a lesson all of us in the media, including whichever poor soul takes over the head position at the BBC, would do well to learn. A spine is a prerequisite to doing this job.

• Feltham is Business Day editor-in-chief.