Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 35 No 23
- What the BBC crisis reveals about modern journalism
- Erica Cervini
- 19 November 2025
‘BBC In Crisis As Tim Davie Resigns’. ‘Tim Davie Quits as BBC Chief, Taking Ultimate Responsibility For Errors’. ‘This Is A Crisis Point For The BBC’. These are just some of the front-page headlines in British newspapers after the bombshell news that the BBC’s boss Tim Davie and BBC news chief Deborah Turness resigned after an internal document was leaked detailing damning examples of news stories and a documentary that allegedly breached BBC’s own standards of impartiality and fairness.
London’s Daily Telegraph published the 19-page document penned by Michael Prescott, a former politics editor at the Sunday Times and a former independent consultant external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee.
Over the last week, reactions to the Prescott document broke along familiar political lines, with some dismissing it as a right-wing assault on the BBC, while others saw it as evidence of an institution compromising its core mission to push a progressive agenda.
This BBC story is one of documented bias that, over years, manifested as silence, omission, a failure to verify facts, and a tendency to make claims based on flimsy evidence. And it has reverberated so widely because the BBC is arguably the world’s leading public media institution, and its authority rests on a long-standing promise of impartiality. That this promise was breached repeatedly and in plain view is what makes the moment one of the most significant crises in its 103-year history.
Prescott charged the BBC with showing systematic bias in its coverage of United States politics, racial diversity, biological sex and gender, and the Israel/Hamas war, and in his view the BBC ‘repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all.’
In the BBC’s coverage of biological sex and gender, Prescott claimed the BBC failed to report on the ‘difficult questions’ and various court cases involving trans issues, despite being widely reported in other media outlets. He claimed the BBC showed systematic bias by presenting only one side in the debate. ‘[There was] a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity,’ he wrote.
Prescott also detailed that the makers of a Panorama documentary had spliced together two parts of Trump’s speech on the day people stormed Capitol Hill. The edited video, Prescott says, gave viewers the impression that Trump was encouraging people to take ‘violent action’. This could have been a genuine mistake, but the issue is that the BBC knew about this but kept silent and did not offer an apology or retraction, until now. Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $US1billion.
Additionally, the BBC also kept quiet about another documentary about children in Gaza whose narrator was the child of a Hamas official. The BBC withdrew the documentary after this fact was revealed and, later, British broadcasting regulator Ofcom found the program was materially misleading. The Prescott document also accuses the BBC in partly failing to cover the Gaza war with fairness and impartiality, while BBC Arabic came in for special mention for limiting Israeli suffering and amplifying its aggression.
“The BBC’s implosion goes well beyond one network’s editorial missteps. It exposes a deeper uncertainty within Western journalism about whether its primary duty is to inform or to persuade.”
The BBC’s implosion goes well beyond one network’s editorial missteps. It exposes a deeper uncertainty within Western journalism about whether its primary duty is to inform or to persuade. The Prescott document crystallises that tension, detailing instances where personal or political commitments appear to have coloured coverage, particularly in contested areas, but it’s a pattern that resonates well beyond the BBC itself.
Australian journalists are also not immune to the same impulse. Debates around the ABC often turn on the same faultlines, questioning when does public journalism become advocacy, and what does that do to the public’s confidence in institutions that depend on impartiality for their legitimacy. This was evident in the criticism of the ABC’s coverage during the Voice referendum campaign, and in recent debates over whether its reporting on gender and trans issues has blurred the line between scrutiny and endorsement. Australian journalist and media commentator Josh Szeps has long argued that too much of media is ideologically-driven. ‘It’s rare’, he says, ‘to find coverage that’s fearless, rigorous, unexpected and plainspoken.’
That dynamic is evident in recent criticism of the ABC’s approach to gender-related court reporting. In a post this week, women’s-rights advocate Sall Grover described years of trying to correct what she viewed as inaccuracies in the ABC’s coverage of the Tickle v. Giggle case, only to receive no response until this week. She argues the broadcaster miscast her as running a ‘two-year public campaign’ against her litigant, a characterisation she says was never revisited or tested against the facts of the appeal, which the ABC admits it did not cover. Her account, whatever one makes of it, underscores a broader vulnerability in public media: when newsrooms adopt a narrative frame before verifying the underlying record, the line between reporting and advocacy blurs, and audiences are left unsure where fact-finding ends and ideology begins.
So if more reporters are now assuming more of an activist stance, why is that the case? For an effective media, we must understand the factors driving journalists to step away from the tradition of impartiality that once anchored the profession and toward a model in which advocacy feels not only permissible but expected.
An Oxford University and Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism report, based on surveys and published earlier this year, provides a fascinating snapshot on how journalists characterise their role. Compared with results from a similar survey eight years ago, journalists now give increasing importance to activist roles.
‘In particular the increased importance of the activist ‘monitor and scrutinise’ role and the decreased importance of the neutral ‘detached observer’ role suggest that UK journalists’ attitudes towards their roles in society have turned more activist since 2015. That journalists emphasised their role as educators even more than they already did in 2015 seems to confirm this trend,’ the report says.
There appears to be a generational shift. Reporters in the under-40 age group were less concerned about their ‘classic’ role as ‘detached observers’ than those over 40 and very interested in ‘educating the audience’. This could inevitably lead to journalists reporting the news through a moralising lens.
It’s notable that the increase in ‘activist journalism’ or ‘accountability journalism’ coincides with the rise in identitarian ideology, noticeably underpinning coverage of controversial issues like the Gaza war. It also coincides with Australian and British universities adopting settler-colonial and race theories in many curriculum materials. The Oxford/Reuters survey found that just over 90 per cent of UK reporters had university degrees and were from relatively privileged backgrounds. In most Australian news organisations, you’d find similar cohorts of journalists.
There are many reasons why more reporters now see their societal role as advocating for a particular worldview rather than simply informing. Understanding that shift would require deeper research, including into the growing number of journalists who host opinion-driven podcasts, a trend that further blurs the line between reporting and commentary.
Journalism schools also need to be researched to establish if there has been a shift to teaching activism-based reporting. I had one of the leading lights in journalism education, Sally White, teach me at RMIT University. It was drummed into us that while we all have biases and particular values, these should not creep into the reporting of news. We couldn’t twist facts or omit them to suit our views. And, if interviewing experts we needed to establish their credentials.
Up until last semester I was teaching media writing at Group of Eight university in Melbourne. I often wondered how the students were being taught journalism. One recent example made me think more about this. Chris Hedges, a freelance American journalist, who worked for the New York Times until he left under a cloud in 2005, was invited to speak to students and staff at the university where I taught. Hedges was on a speaking tour supported by the Australian Friends of Palestine Association.
In speeches, (he claims the National Press Club uninvited him) Hedges made statements such as: ‘Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue,’ ‘History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabise an Arab country.’ ‘Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil.’
I don’t have a problem with him speaking to students, but I do have a problem with the journalism school not having someone to also give a speech to counter or question Hedges’ claims. That was left up to ABC’s Night Life presenter David Marr, who formerly anchored Media Watch. He asked Hedges for evidence of his claims. Interestingly, Hedges revealed that he wasn’t bothered by the fact he was being sponsored by an advocacy group.
It’s a challenging environment for reporters when they are being told to do more in a shrinking newsroom. AI is breathing down their necks and they get attacked by all sides on social media. Print media is struggling, and the BBC is increasingly losing the public. There is a continuing downturn in British people paying their yearly licence fee, which partly supports the BBC.
Yet if reporters eschew some of the classic responsibilities of the journalist and become more activist in nature, how seriously will the public take their reporting, and will they end up speaking only to their own echo-chamber?
The BBC crisis has shone a light on a profession facing a series of difficult choices. If reporters continue to drift from the discipline of impartiality toward a model of journalism shaped by advocacy and personal conviction, they risk losing not only public trust but the very audience they hope to influence. Restoring faith in public journalism will require a renewed commitment to impartiality, balance and intellectual humility, the old disciplines that allowed newsrooms to serve the whole public rather than the likeminded few. Without that return, even the most venerable institutions may find themselves speaking only to their own echo chambers, long after the public has stopped listening.
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