FOLLOWING the sensational resignations of BBC Director General Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness, the Today programme on Monday was a litmus test of how the Corporation would react. Forty years ago, it might have carried a reasonably balanced account of the huge unresolved impartiality issues now in play.

Not so now.

A 19-page internal dossier by independent editorial adviser Michael Prescott had laid out in forensic detail how sick BBC journalism had become. The centrepiece was the blatant doctoring in an edition of Panorama of a Donald Trump speech to make him look like an inciter of violence. Prescott also catalogued a long list of failures of impartiality in the coverage of areas of massive public concern, such as immigration, transgender ideology, the handling of Gaza and much more.

From News-watch’s origins 25 years ago, it has worked on the basis that the only way of establishing whether the BBC meets its impartiality requirement is by thorough and systematic analysis of programme transcripts. What follows is based on such an exercise.

This should have been a morning when the BBC confronted the specific damaging indictment as well as the question of its broader institutional bias. A balanced journalistic approach would have brought into focus searching questions about how and why the speech was doctored and about the quality and accuracy of content generally. Instead, Today delivered a three-hour broadcast of defiance and denial designed to show that the BBC, ‘the most trusted news organisation in the world’, was under a conspiratorial populist right-wing attack. Lead presenter Nick Robinson abandoned impartiality and appointed himself as the mouthpiece of this defiance in the first salvo of a declaration of war against the Corporation’s critics. He was clearly infuriated that the BBC’s ‘moral superiority’ and probity had been challenged.

Exhibit A is that Robinson delivered two long, almost-identical monologues, one at 6.33am, the other at 8.10. Both were strident editorials light years away from objective journalism. After being ‘up all night talking to staff’, he felt able to claim there had been ‘a coup inside the BBC’.

Exhibit B is that he reduced Michael Prescott’s dossier of bias and doctoring to merely ‘a leaked memo from a former adviser’.

Exhibit C is his assertion that BBC journalism is, despite the claims against it, and the fact that senior editorial figures had inexplicably ignored Prescott’s internal evidence to the Editorial Standards and Guidance Committee for months, still ‘the most trusted news organisation in this country’.

Exhibit D is the selection of guests.

Today has often been found guilty of editorialising, but in the hundreds of programmes News-watch has monitored over the years never have any of its presenters been given what amounted to two scripted essays in a single morning. This has all the hallmarks of a uniquely crude editorial decision to convert Monday’s flagship news and current affairs programme into a PR vehicle to do three things. First, to play down a shocking indictment of the BBC – that it committed the grossest imaginable ethical offence as a news provider by doctoring footage of an hour apart to make it look as though Donald Trump incited the January 6th insurrection. Second, to discredit critics. Third, to turn Donald Trump, who had announced he was going to sue the BBC, into the chief source of attack on the BBC – deflecting from the damning revelation itself.

Read More – How smug Nick Robinson led the BBC’s brazen defence of its own mendacity