BBC under pressure: Diminished resources, oversight; increasingly violent criticism in public sphere

“There is increasingly violent cynicism and criticism of the BBC amongst the public, but particularly amongst politicians,” warns François Picard’s Top Story guest: Professor Charlie Beckett, veteran journalist, editor and Professor of Practice and the London School of Economics’ Director of Polis and the Polis/LSE JournalismAI project. Professor Beckett argues that the current turbulence at the BBC goes far beyond the fallout from a “bad edit” of Trump’s infamous January 6th speech in a special edition of Panorama on Trump’s second run for the presidency. Our guest asserts that the BBC’s “extraordinary” loss of its top two executives is symptomatic of a decline in institutional trust, squeezed resources, weakened oversight and an environment in which politicised criticism and commercial pressure undermine the idea of an independent public service broadcaster. And the fragility of journalism is becoming more evident in a fractured hyper-politicised media eco‑system, where the audience demands relevance, the players fight for funding, and the mission becomes harder to maintain. Professor Beckett contends that if the BBC cannot defend its distinctiveness, transparency and value, we may lose not just a broadcaster but a valued global institution that has long stood for “objective, evidence‑based” journalism. The crisis, then, is both internal and external: “In the same way that Donald Trump attacked media organisations that weren’t slavishly loyal to him, so we’re getting a much more partisan approach from politicians in the UK, and indeed from our newspapers, like the Daily Telegraph, which has always been very honestly right-wing, but is increasingly anti-BBC.