Dr Julie Posetti, a Professor of Journalism at the City University of London, described the growing scandal over editorial bias at the BBC as an “existential crisis”.
She warned: “You cannot have democracy without credible public interest media.”
Democracy relies on citizens making informed choices, and that requires trustworthy journalism. When a public broadcaster like the BBC misrepresents facts, it doesn’t just damage its reputation, it erodes public trust in the media – and democracy itself.
Trust is something the BBC promotes heavily. It is the very thing they would have us believe separates them from competing news sources. A belief they can be trusted is at the heart of their success – which is why the recent scandal is such a big deal: If the BBC can’t be trusted, who can?
Founded in 1922, the British Broadcasting Corporation is one of the world’s oldest and most influential public broadcasters. It has become a global institution – the go-to source of world news for broadcasters around the globe, including New Zealand.
The BBC is the embodiment of public service broadcasting. Funded primarily through a licence fee paid by UK households, it delivers independent, universally accessible content free from commercial or political interference.
Its mission — enshrined in a Royal Charter — is to inform, educate, and entertain. While renowned for its news coverage, the BBC has also produced some of the most iconic television programmes in history. From classic comedies like Monty Python to long-running dramas like Silent Witness, its influence in our living rooms is undeniable.
Broadcasting in over 40 languages, the BBC’s network of 22,000 staff, brings news and entertainment to more than 400 million people in over 240 countries each week.
A governing Board ensures the BBC stays independent from political influence, while remaining accountable to the public. While the Board sets overarching guidelines to ensure content is accurate, impartial, and fair, a dedicated sub-committee monitors whether these editorial standards are being upheld across all BBC output.
The Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) is comprised of five non-executive directors supported by internal and external expert advisers. It reviews editorial risks, complaints, and compliance trends for the Board, recommending changes to policy or practice, and playing a pivotal role in scrutinising contentious content.
One of the BBC’s most experienced senior journalists, David Grossman, a Chief Correspondent for Newsnight, served as a Senior Editorial Adviser to the EGSC. His brief to support the committee with research, analysis, and oversight of editorial compliance, had a special focus on high-risk controversial cases.
It was in that role that he took particular interest in the BBC’s Panorama documentary about the US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, that screened on 28 October 2024 – a week before the Presidential Election.
It is “Trump: A Second Chance?” that is at the centre of the BBC’s current crisis.
David Grossman not only watched the documentary, but also viewed the featured speech that Donald Trump delivered on January 6, 2021 – the day Congress convened a joint session to count Electoral College votes and supporters stormed Capitol Hill.
He picked up glaring inconsistencies: the BBC documentary entirely omitted the President’s call for a peaceful protest, depicting him instead as inciting violence.
In his report to the EGSC, he described the programme’s editing as “dodgy” and exposed the Panorama scandal.
What the BBC had done was edit Donald Trump’s speech to deliberately imply he’d encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
That ‘speech’ clip was then followed by video footage of his supporters marching towards Congress, to create the impression that they’d taken up his ‘call-to-arms’.
What actually happened was quite different.
Donald Trump’s supporters began marching to Capitol Hill before he started speaking.
Fifteen minutes into his address he said, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you.”
He then said: “And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women… We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated… I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The comments: “and we fight. We fight like hell…” came 54 minutes later, at the end of the speech.
In his report to the EGSC David Grossman highlighted the fact that Panorama had spliced together two clips from separate parts of Donald Trump’s speech to create the impression that he’d said something he did not. In doing so, they materially misled BBC viewers.
When BBC News executives were presented with these facts at a meeting in May, they dismissed the concerns arguing the edit was typical and not misleading.
But as the BBC’s Senior Adviser to the EGSC – a committee specifically established to act as a watchdog to ensure content met editorial guidelines – he strongly disagreed. And, with senior BBC Executives repeatedly dismissing or ignoring the serious editorial breaches he flagged, in mid-2025 he resigned from his role.
Michael Prescott, a former journalist and political editor of the Sunday Times, who served as one of two independent external advisers to the EGSC, was so outraged by the BBC Board’s failure to adequately address the editorial bias identified by David Grossman, that he too stepped down.
Frustrated, he authored the memo to the Board that triggered the crisis that has now engulfed the BBC – as a last-ditch attempt to get them to take matters seriously.
He wrote: “I departed with profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC. Since leaving, I have thought long and hard about what, if anything, to do about this. My conclusion is that these concerns are serious enough for me to draw them to your attention, in your oversight role of the BBC. What follows is a summary of some of the most troubling matters to come before the EGSC during my term.
“My view is that the Executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all. Indeed, I would argue that the Executive’s attitude when confronted with evidence of serious and systemic problems is now a systemic problem in itself – meaning the last recourse for action is the Board.
“One of the defences often deployed by the BBC when criticised by external organisations is to claim the evidence presented is mere ‘cherry picking’. This is why David’s reports were so very important: they came from within the BBC and were produced by a very experienced and talented BBC journalist. Yet his findings were still, on the whole, dismissed or ignored, even after EGSC members tried to press home the case for full-blooded action.
“What motivated me to prepare this note is despair at inaction by the BBC Executive when issues come to light. On no other occasion in my professional life have I witnessed what I did at the BBC with regard to how management dealt with (or failed to deal with) serious recurrent problems. My hope is that you may be able to ensure action where the EGSC has not.”
Michael Prescott’s leaked memo not only flagged the misleading edits in the Panorama documentary, but other serious concerns including BBC coverage of Gaza, trans issues, racism framing, and even the accuracy of Verify, the organisation’s “fact-checking” service – all of which had been dismissed or downplayed by the Executive.
Describing the BBC’s internal culture as one of “denial, delusion and defensiveness,” where senior executives hoped problems would simply “go away and no one would find out,” his resignation and whistleblowing memo triggered a governance crisis that has already resulted in two senior BBC resignations – the Director-General, Tim Davie, and the CEO of News Deborah Turness.
The implications of the BBC crisis for New Zealand are serious – as this week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, award winning journalist and host of Newstalk ZB’s Drive show, Heather du Plessis-Allan, explains:
“The fact that this bias scandal at the BBC has claimed two of the most senior executives there tells you how serious it is. And it’s not just serious for the BBC, it’s serious for basically all the mainstream media outlets in the English-speaking world.
“There are some media organisations out there that are so beyond reproach that other media outlets – like ourselves – will take their content and not re-verify it, because it’s the BBC and we shouldn’t have to re-verify it. And if they’re infected by bias, we all become infected by bias.
“Whether it’s their obvious bias on Gaza, their bias on trans issues, their bias on Trump – which they have been well and truly busted for – their bias becomes everybody else’s bias, because we’re taking their content.”
And that’s a real problem for New Zealand when content produced by our leading news outlets – especially state-owned Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand – is heavily influenced by the BBC, and, according to Heather, never fact-checked.
In addition to dealing with the Panorama scandal and fallout from maligning the President of the USA – as well as all of the other matters raised in the leaked memo – the BBC has also launched an inquiry into accusations that its coverage of climate change is biased.
For those who understand that human activity is not responsible for global warming, the BBC’s amplification of climate alarmism represents a dangerous escalation. Its influence reverberates globally, pressuring governments to adopt policy agendas that are undermining economic growth and eroding living standards.
Nowhere is this more evident than in New Zealand, where mainstream media echo the BBC’s climate scaremongering with little scrutiny. The result has been a wave of policy decisions that, under the banner of saving the planet, are driving our economic decline.
Meanwhile, the world’s largest economies have rejected this flawed ideology, choosing instead to prioritise growth and prosperity for their citizens.
In his memo, Michael Prescott revealed the BBC coverage of trans issues was a key concern. It turns out that a specialist LGBTQ desk within News had been “captured” by a small group of activists dedicated to keeping all other perspectives off-air by effectively censoring content. By declining to cover any story raising difficult questions about trans issues, they instead opted to drip-feed a constant stream of one-sided stories celebrating the trans experience without balance or objectivity.
This is the sort of newsroom “capture” that in New Zealand has resulted in “Maorification”.
When Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government established their $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund in 2021, they deliberately tied funding to a requirement for recipients to establish Maori co-governance structures within their news organisations.
In practice, this meant Labour’s radical He Puapua agenda — aimed at replacing democracy with tribal rule – faced no meaningful media scrutiny when it was forced onto the country without any public mandate whatsoever. And with PIJF funding locked in until 2026, New Zealand’s mainstream media remains largely captured as an echo chamber for the tribal elite.
Let’s be blunt: with on-going concerns about editorial bias and a lack of balance, New Zealand has been starved of credible mainstream journalism for years. And while alternative outlets do a valiant job in fighting for the truth, without a trusted Fourth Estate acting as a public watchdog, New Zealanders are extremely vulnerable to misinformation and political capture – as we saw in the Maori ward referendum results.
The BBC’s crisis serves to remind us that credible media isn’t a luxury – it’s a democratic necessity. We should not have to put up with biased media. Journalism should be independent, impartial, and balanced. Their mission should be to inform citizens, not manipulate them.
Reform cannot come fast enough!
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4 comments:
What a breathtakingly honest dissection of why critical thinkers stopped following this blatant propaganda masquerading as authentic news. Where are the weights and measures to scrutinise its authenticity? Why is comrade Ardern’s poisonous Public Interest Journalism Fund still operating under this new Govt when its objectives are menacing to New Zealand’s best interests?
Thank God we have Muriel Newman’s platform “Breaking Views” to challenge the corrupt MSM’s desire to blatantly shape public opinion.
We live in an age today where the left and right of politics no longer speak with each other.
Both now hold the belief that the other is an actual enemy. The left seem more bullish in the belief that if you are not with us you are against us philosophy and we see this both in the USA and the UK but also now in NZ.
The debate of the 'rights and wrongs' of one political thinking over another can now not be had. This primarily I believe is because both parties have been isolated from facts, truths and brutal realities of thier own thinking to various degrees.
This has come about because the MSM et al have in fact become tools of the ideologues either inside or outside of governement. The MSM have been infiltrated (like academia and the public service) with people who hold very strong views about very specific topics and these people are unable to be countered because those who would argue remain ill informed by media or intend threatened/sanctioned.
As is stated in the article you cannot have democracy without credible public interest media. Democracy relies on citizens making informed choices, and that requires trustworthy journalism.
What we now have of course is media that is untrustworthy from all political outlooks and hence the battle lines have been drawn.
Mark Twain once stated that if you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed. How true his satirical take on media has become.
New Zealand has of course its very own versions of the BBC in both TV1 and RNZ (among the many). They have become perveyors of the one sided narrative. Journalists in NZ are proven through polling to be quite left of centre-left and this has sadly become more revealing in their reporting. The last Labour governements PJIF assisted this too.
The citizens are at war in NZ left and right but not on political policy but on ideology and indentity. Media are sadly at the beating heart of how we got here and have done nothing to dissuade their readership in this war of thought. A good balanced media would provide the tools for people to see a clearer picture of both sides and manage a truce. I guess for them it is a case of if it bleeds it leads and sadly they have become very good warmongers.
There was a point when you could say nothing praiseworthy about President Trump without being vilified. Those who watched unedited speeches on alternative media, were only trying to make the point that many media outlets were indeed presenting "fake news". This has nothing to do with whether you agree with someone like Trump or not. I observed most articles on TV1 were regurgitated from CNN without any local commentary. Therefore we were getting the same edited clips here. Many of us thus stopped watching our totally biased media. The BBC and ABC were no different. The only source of unedited news was from independent outlets, which the astute person latched onto. The media has been politicised for a long time now. All people want is fact not someones opinions.
Alas, bias is now fashionable for the new crop of journalism majors. Activism is their reason de jour. Impartiality, to them, is a social construct and an outdated concept that can be dismissed as easily as their mentor was so ably allowed to simply say, “I absolutely refute that!” Without ever then presenting any form of argument. Moving on to, Tova, then Jessica. Or occasionally Jenna. That’s modern media. And we’re not falling for it anymore.
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