You can’t tweet what you like, BBC stars to be told

BBC presenters could be reined in on social media as the corporation’s new director-general this week confronts questions over its impartiality.

Tim Davie is expected to address allegations of bias levelled at the corporation on Thursday in his first speech after taking over from Lord Hall, The

Sunday Telegraph has learnt. Senior insiders have told this newspaper Mr Davie may touch on the findings of an internal review into the use of social media by BBC staff, conducted by Richard Sambrook, a former director of global news at the broadcaster.

The report is said to raise concerns about a “small minority” of journalists in news and current affairs, whose conduct on social media has triggered complaints that the BBC is failing to uphold its duties on impartiality.

It is also believed to raise questions over the role of high-profile freelancers, including those allowed to speak more freely because they work outside current affairs and news, and outside the impartiality requirements. BBC freelancers including Gary Lineker, the sports presenter, have clashed with colleagues and MPs for airing their political views on Brexit and the Government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Lineker has previously said he can “tweet what he likes”.

Although the final report has not yet been presented to senior BBC management, it is understood that Mr Davie has taken a keen interest in the review.

While Mr Sambrook declined to comment, the review is expected to

If the BBC’s new director-general was in any doubt about the scale of the challenge he faces in reforming the corporation, events this week will have made it painfully clear.

Tim Davie, who takes up his post next week, has already been forced to intervene to bring some much needed common sense to the BBC’s consideration of removing the patriotic anthem Rule, Britannia from the Last Night of the Proms.

It seems BBC bosses were so fearful of causing offence to woke activists who claimed the song was racist, they ended up outraging the vast majority of the public who are proud of their country, its heritage and its traditions.

What the Rule, Britannia debacle shows is that BBC decision makers have lost sight of who they are working for and are basing decisions on their own sensibilities, rather than the values and views of the audience they are supposed to serve.

The BBC has been culturally captured by the woke-dominated group think of some of its own staff. There is a default Left-leaning attitude from a metropolitan workforce mostly drawn from a similar social and economic background.

When the BBC moved some of its output out of London, it simply replaced metropolitan London with metropolitan Manchester, Leeds or Glasgow.

The BBC has strict editorial guidelines and processes to ensure the sensibilities and sensitivities of its audience are paramount. But all too often, as one insider put it to me, “BBC staff are making programmes for other BBC staff – not for licence fee payers”.

Once the gold standard of impartial, fair and accurate news, BBC journalists are increasingly letting their political preferences show. This can range from subtle bias, such as liking certain tweets, to flagrant breaches of the

BBC’s impartiality rules – such as Lewis Goodall, policy editor, grabbing the cover story of Left-wing magazine with his attack on the handling of exam grading.

Over time, BBC’s news teams have focused on other priorities than impartiality – such as making an impact for a particular programme or raising the profile of individual journalists.

Social media has eaten away at BBC impartiality, encouraging staff to see online success in terms of the number of followers or the number of times a post is liked or retweeted. That leads to news programmes seeking controversy and the “car-crash interview” while journalists blur the line between reporting and political commentary.

There is an obvious long-term recruitment challenge for Mr Davie to grapple with but the BBC also requires more urgent reform.

The erosion of BBC staff ’s online impartiality is subject to an internal review, the results of which will be revealed by Mr Davie in a keynote speech on the corporation’s reform next week. But top-down decrees for a change of direction, no matter how correct, will fall foul of the pervading BBC culture unless enforced with radical action.

The BBC’s editorial decisions are devolved to departmental heads, programme editors, item producers, reporters and presenters. That means, unless calls for reform come with a new system that rewards programme impartiality and is accompanied by rigorous enforcement, nothing will change.

The BBC’s referendum coverage shows it is more than capable of enforcing impartiality. At the start of the EU referendum campaign, senior BBC executives and news editors met to discuss how to cover what promised to be one of the most potentially divisive political events in modern history.

There was widespread concern that, regardless of outcome, the losing side in the debate would seek to blame “BBC bias” in part for the result. It led to the imposition of an “impartiality first” culture throughout the campaign.

Programme commissions were regularly checked to ensure they represented a wide spectrum of views. It was used most notably to prevent soap operas, dramas and specials – from

Countryfile to EastEnders – from injecting anti-Brexit political script lines just because it was deemed topical. On news output, everything from running orders and language to guest bookings were subjected to the impartiality test.

Yet almost as soon as Britain’s verdict was delivered, the rigorous rules were relaxed and anti-Brexit bias and metropolitan “group think” crept back into the corporation’s coverage.

What was achieved on a temporary basis can become the norm.

In order to avoid political bias in news and entertainment, a cross-BBC steering group should be established. Its aim would be to ensure impartiality across all BBC output and that content genuinely reflects the outlook of the country. Impartiality should not be just part of the mix but the number one priority and starting point for every item and running order.

In order to provide evidence and benchmarks on which impartiality can be judged, the BBC Board, working with the BBC Editorial Policy and Standards department, should commission regular Ofsted-style reports into individual programmes and how the BBC is handling a particular running story.

The BBC can only be justified as a publicly funded broadcaster if it provides something its commercial rivals and newspapers do not – truly impartial news coverage.

Over the past decade, the BBC has drifted away from its purpose and the people it serves. The arrival of Mr Davie offers a real chance to change course – BBC staff must not squander it.

Sir Robbie Gibb is the former head of BBC Westminster and former director of communications at No10 Downing Street

Some of its own staff think the BBC has been culturally captured by the woke-dominated group think