Can the BBC survive as a national institution commanding widespread respect? And in an age of media behemoths such as Netflix, will the relatively small Corporation become irrelevant?
These are questions which anyone who feels affection for the BBC, as I do despite everything, is bound to ask. To say Auntie has an existential crisis is no exaggeration.
One gigantic problem — which I don’t apologise for mentioning again — is political bias. It is getting worse, almost certainly because of the divisions over Brexit, to which most BBC journalists are viscerally opposed.
The Corporation has long been left-of-centre, as franker employees such as presenter Andrew Marr and former director-general Mark Thompson have admitted. But more than ever, it resembles a metropolitan sect increasingly out of touch with much of the country.
Can the BBC survive as a national institution commanding widespread respect, asks Stephen Glover
There have been three very recent examples of the BBC displaying blatant bias. The first came after The Sun newspaper discovered that the young Jeremy Corbyn met a Czech spy on at least three occasions in the Eighties when the Cold War was at its height.
That the meetings took place is not in doubt since they are documented in a Czech archive. None of the papers which carried the story accused the Labour leader of spying. There were simply questions hanging in the air.
But our national broadcaster — with an audience far greater than the readership of all newspapers — didn’t ask them. Four days passed before it even acknowledged there was a story involving the young Corbyn.
Why didn’t the BBC investigate such important allegations? I suggest a mixture of fear and sympathy. Many at the BBC believe Corbyn may be on the verge of power, and they don’t want a fight with Labour.
More than that, Corbyn is popular at Broadcasting House, doubtless partly because he is increasingly anti-Brexit. This is a complete turnaround from the days after his election as leader in 2015, when the BBC treated him as a nincompoop.
Let’s apply what Auntie rather pompously terms a ‘reality check’. If it emerged that the young Theresa May had met a member of the far-right National Front three times 30 years ago, would the BBC have ignored the story? You know the answer.
A similar combination of fear and covert support surely explains the Corporation’s indulgent treatment of Jeremy Corbyn after his change of mind about the customs union — which he previously strongly opposed — earlier this week.
Like any politician he is entitled to change his opinion, but we can be certain that if the Prime Minister had undertaken such a clumsy U-turn, she would have been hauled across the coals by the BBC.
Yet Corbyn’s contradictions were barely examined. For example, his contention that Britain could remain part of the customs union and negotiate its own free trade deals outside the EU — definitely not true — passed virtually unchallenged.
Isn’t this bad journalism? I can’t believe that even at the anti-Brexit, pro-Corbyn BBC there aren’t some decent journalists who are ashamed of giving the Labour leader a free ride.
The third example of bias came yesterday after the Mail revealed how Max Mosley supported the revoltingly racist far-Right in the early Sixties, and apparently concealed this fact when successfully suing the now defunct News of the World in 2008 for describing his orgy as Nazi-themed.
You’d have thought this was meat and drink for the Beeb, especially after Channel Four News brilliantly eviscerated Mosley. But for several hours it was shtum. When Labour announced it wouldn’t be accepting more money from Mosley, the BBC carried a brief story on its website, but still ignored it on its news bulletins.
Was it fear of the tycoon that held Auntie back? Or was she unwilling to pick up the story because it had originated in the Mail, which her left-leaning journalists regard with suspicion? Either way, it was another instance of disgracefully inept journalism.
And in an age of media behemoths such as Netflix (pictured CEO Reed Hastings), will the relatively small Corporation become irrelevant?
Believe me, I don’t expect Auntie to follow up every Mail story, or to reflect its political views. Obviously it has a duty to the entire country.
But it also has a responsibility to cover well-researched major stories about powerful politicians and bullying tycoons, possibly perjuring themselves.
No, the truth is the BBC has become timid and hidebound, and the views of its journalists, so fashionable in parts of the capital, seem increasingly far removed from what many normal people think.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in its coverage of Brexit, undeniably skewed in favour of Remain. The Beeb can protest all it likes, but licence payers recognise bias when they are battered over the head day after day.
According to a recent YouGov poll, nearly half of Leave voters think the BBC has an anti-Brexit agenda. Even among Remain voters there are more people (14 per cent) who think the Corporation is anti-Brexit than there are those who believe it is pro-Brexit (13 per cent).
It’s not healthy for an organisation reliant on public funding to be so out of tune with the feelings of a great swathe of its audience. And this at a time when most young people aren’t watching terrestrial television, or listening to radio news.
The gulf between BBC senior staff in the Westminster bubble, and the lives of people out in the real world, was also illuminated by the recent row over salaries.
There are anomalies between the pay of male and female ‘stars’, which are being corrected. But many will have been bewildered by the unseemly grumblings of some highly paid senior female employees — for example, ex-China editor Carrie Gracie, earning £135,000 a year.
Nor did any of these disgruntled women point out that almost every senior vacancy these days is filled by a female — so terrified are politically-correct male executives of upsetting the sisterhood.
The recently appointed editor of Newsnight? A woman. The new head of news? Also a woman. The new editors of the Today Programme, BBC1’s Question Time (often packed with Remainers, by the way) and Panorama? All women.
I’m sure many of them are as good as men, but it is ridiculous for women to argue that their gender is suffering discrimination when they are, self-evidently, filling the top positions.
I mention this as another illustration of the inward-looking and sometimes petty nature of the modern BBC —the tendency of some employees to carry on as though the rest of us barely exist.
On Tuesday, Comcast, the enormous U.S. cable operator, made a bid for the 61 per cent of Sky Television not owned by Rupert Murdoch, valuing the company at £22.1 billion. It may succeed.
This set me thinking. Comcast and Walt Disney (another suitor for Sky) and Netflix are ruthless American mega-companies that dwarf Auntie — fuddy-duddy, stuck in the past, introverted, and run by a cautious director-general, Tony Hall, who is ill-adapted to the new media world.
Its source of funding, the licence fee, was dreamt up in another age. It is bureaucratic and cumbersome, apparently secure with its guaranteed income, but in fact incapable of competing with new media giants.
Admittedly it still produces some great programmes — for example, David Attenborough’s Blue Planet and myriad period dramas, though its modern offerings, such as David Hare’s clunking new series Collateral, often crackle with Leftist propaganda.
But looking at the BBC — its inbred leftist bias, its monumental self-righteousness, its self-regarding sense of entitlement — can one say with confidence that it will be around in its existing form in 10 or 15 years? I don’t think so.