The outgoing BBC director general Tim Davie recently had an article published by The Times under the headline “Unshackle the BBC from the politics of charter renewal”.
In the piece he promotes the corporation’s response to the Green Paper published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in December 2025 as part of its review of the current BBC Royal Charter.
The proposals put forward in the BBC’s response included an end to the ten-year time frame of the Charter, changes to appointments to the board overseeing the BBC and the resumption of full government funding of the BBC World Service.
Remarkably, the 100-page response included little introspection and failed to address any of the issues that led to the resignations of Davie and the BBC’s CEO of News four months ago – or which have prompted more and more members of the British public to stop paying the licence fee.
When Davie took on the role of director general in September 2020, he stressed his determination to tackle the issue of impartiality, particularly in relation to social media use by BBC staff.
Less than a year later, Camera Arabic highlighted problematic posts by some of BBC Arabic’s employees. Following the Hamas-led invasion of Israel in October 2023, that issue became even more acute, with breaches of the corporation’s guidance on social media use continuing.
The BBC’s failure to adequately address serious ongoing issues at its foreign language channels such as BBC Arabic and BBC Persian should surely raise questions concerning its new demand for taxpayer funding of the World Service via the UK government.
In his Times article, Davie stated that “[a]round the world, truth is under all-out assault” and proposes to “do more...to tackle disinformation”. Notably, the costly department that was set up in May 2023 to do precisely that has more than once failed to live up to expectations. BBC Verify has repeatedly promoted unverified Hamas claims concerning casualties in the Gaza Strip and to this day cannot provide BBC audiences with an accurate and impartial account of what happened at Al Ahli hospital in October 2023.
On Davie’s watch the BBC has also been embroiled in scandals such as its 2021 misrepresentation of a video of a racist incident in London and its commissioning of a documentary narrated by the son of a Hamas official.
The BBC’s response includes a section headed “The role of complaints in public accountability”, which states: “The process should be easy to understand, accessible and timely.”
The BBC’s complaints procedure has, however, failed to meet those conditions for years, with complaints often brushed off using irrelevant arguments and responses frequently failing to arrive within the time-frame set by the BBC itself. When complainants wait 18 months or more for a reply, that procedure cannot possibly be described as “timely” – but no significant improvements have been seen since the issue was raised in the 2024 mid-term review.
The response also states: “We will always strive for the highest standards in what we do. But with the volume of output we produce, mistakes will happen. We recognise that it is how we deal with those mistakes as a corporation, transparently and fairly, that is vital.”
Notably, its proposals do not include any mechanism to ensure that audiences are made aware of corrections to reports they read weeks or months earlier, such as a dedicated corrections page on the BBC News website.
The issues that have led to diminishing trust in the UK’s public broadcaster – and Davie’s resignation – extend far beyond its coverage of Israel and the Jewish community and many members of the BBC’s funding public are still hoping for some answerability on a range of topics.
In the BBC’s response to the DCMS Green Paper, however, they learn that its outgoing director general appears to aspire to leave a legacy that in fact diminishes the corporation’s accountability to the public rather than improving it.
Hadar Sela is co-editor of Camera UK
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