(Now former) BBC Director-General Tim Davie speaks at the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI) annual conference at the Vox Conference Centre in Birmingham on November 22, 2022.
Oli Scarff / AFP
Broadcasting officials wrongly believe “their left-wing mindset is the political centre-ground and thus embodies balance.”
One of, if not the world’s most famous broadcaster(s) must look for a new director-general—that is, effectively, a new boss—and head of news after both quit on Sunday over the latest of many rows over political bias.
The BBC, which is paid for by the British taxpayer (via the compulsory TV licence fee), has been under heavy fire since it emerged earlier this month that it had edited U.S. President Donald Trump’s January 6th, 2021, speech in a way that made it appear as though he was encouraging supporters to riot at the Capitol.
Trump on Sunday described these departed figures as “very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.”
On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!
He has since sent a letter to the BBC threatening legal action.
This, of course, is just the latest in a long list of scandals, another recent one following the airing of a documentary on Gaza narrated by a Hamas official’s son (!). Indeed, the Campaign Against Antisemitism said on Sunday that “the BBC has often served as a mouthpiece for Hamas, feeding licence fee payers a diet of propaganda that has been a central feature of the drumbeat of incitement across the West.”
The resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness should be seen as an admission through gritted teeth that the much vaunted impartiality of the BBC has been a sham.
The BBC's growing bias has extended over many years across a wide array of issues, but for British Jews, the… pic.twitter.com/guEYA7gdXl
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) November 9, 2025
More broadly, the corporation has for years been accused of pushing a liberal worldview on no end of political and cultural issues.
Reform leader Nigel Farage said on Monday that the BBC has been biased “for decades,” warning:
The BBC should get back to doing news, but just to doing straight news, if it can manage that it has something of a future, if it can’t, it has no future at all.
'The BBC has been institutionally biased for decades'
Nigel Farage adds: 'The BBC should get back to doing news, but just to doing straight news, if it can manage that it has something of a future, if it can't, it has no future at all'
Farage suggested that to get back to ‘doing news,’ the resignations so far “must be the start of wholesale change,” while his deputy leader Richard Tice also stressed that the BBC “needs reform.”
Journalist Melanie Phillips has also written that one fundamental problem with the institution is that “BBC executives, like many if not most of its journalists, believe that their left-wing mindset is the political centre-ground and thus embodies balance, fairness and truth. Anyone who challenges that mindset is therefore axiomatically regarded as an extremist or hopeless partisan and is self-righteously ignored.”
The BBC’s next director-general will be appointed by the corporation’s board.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
