The BBC Crisis: A reckoning for all
The BBC’s troubles have been treated as a story about one broadcaster.
They are not.
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It is right to acknowledge that the Panorama edit of Donald Trump’s speech was misleading and editorially indefensible.
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It serves no one to shield the BBC when it gets things wrong.
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But it serves the country even less to imagine that these problems stop at Broadcasting House. We should just as firmly ensure that every outlet shaping public understanding, whether publicly funded, privately held or platform-run, is held to the same standards of transparency, accuracy and responsibility.
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The UK is facing a collapse in trust in the news, one of the sharpest and deepest in Europe, at the very moment when formal oversight is weakest.
Moments like this don’t come often.
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This cannot be another passing argument about impartiality. The collapse of trust in news is not the product of one edit or one broadcaster. Either we use this moment to put trust back at the centre of British media, every part of it, or we watch it corrode for good.
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Impartiality breaches
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Recent concerns about the Panorama edit, now widely regarded as misleading and editorially indefensible, reflect a recurring pattern of problems at the BBC identified but not resolved.
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It would be reassuring to believe that culture is unique to the BBC. It is not.
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Across British media, scrutiny is all too often reactive. We wait for controversy to expose failure instead of building systems that prevent it.
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And the evidence bears that out: in three years, Ofcom has recorded fewer than a dozen impartiality breaches across hundreds of thousands of broadcast hours, a statistic that reflects not the health of oversight, but its limits.
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Public complaints reflect that narrow scope. Cardiff University’s Enhancing Impartiality project found that more than half of all Ofcom complaints concerned offensive or harmful content, whilst fewer than 5% related to bias or accuracy.
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Source: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-standards/broadcast-bulletins
Public trust in news
According to the Reuters Institute, the share of people in the UK who say they “trust most news most of the time” has fallen from 51% in 2015 to 35% in 2024, one of the sharpest declines, and now among the lowest trust levels in Europe.
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This is not the consequence of one organisation’s failure. In fact the BBC retains relatively high levels of public confidence.
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But trust is the foundation of any credible media system and on that test, Britain is under real pressure.
Media ownership
The weakness of scrutiny is mirrored by the concentration of ownership.​​
The UK’s media is among the most concentrated in Europe.
As the Media Reform Coalition notes, three companies control 90% of national newspaper circulation, two of which are owned offshore or by foreign investors.
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The public has a right to know who owns, funds and directs the media they consume, and whose interests it ultimately serves.
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Sources: compiled from publicly available sources including Media Reform Coalition (2025) Who Owns the UK Media? https://www.mediareform.org.uk/
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The questions that must now be answered
Why should the public trust a media system that no longer regulates itself effectively?
How can audiences make informed choices when they’re not told who owns, funds or steers the news they consume?
If trust continues to collapse, what fills the gap, accountability journalism or unregulated partisan platforms?
What do we lose, culturally and democratically, when local news disappears?
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