Tim Davie tells BBC staff ‘we have to fight for our journalism’ as Trump threatens $1bn lawsuit – UK politics live | Politics

There has been no shortage of former BBC journalists setting out their views on the corporation’s current crisis. Here are three articles worth reading.

• Danny Shaw, a BBC former home affairs correspondent, says in an article for the Spectator today that groupthink was a problem when he was at the corporation.

There is nothing wrong with being proud of the organisation you work for – and there is everything right about working closely together as a team. But the danger is that it breeds a kind of ‘groupthink’ in which alternative or unfashionable views are marginalised, and where external complaints about your output are dismissed. I was sometimes guilty of it myself during 31 years at the BBC and I believe it’s at the root of the scandal that has now cost Tim Davie, the Director-General, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of News, their jobs.

Indeed, the tunnel vision that has led some BBC shows and journalists down the wrong track on the Middle East and trans issues reminds me of our past reporting on immigration. From about 2004, when the expansion of the EU sparked an influx of migrants to the UK, to the Brexit referendum in 2016, BBC News failed properly to reflect concerns about the impact of mass migration, in particular, the way it was changing the nature of many of our towns and cities.

I despair at the position it is now in. I have little to no sympathy for Tim Davie. He has helped create the problem by constantly opining on the BBC being too liberal. He has legitimised the critique which has toppled him. He appeased the same forces who have brought him down. He seemed to me to think little about what impartial journalism means in this age of universal deceit. I am also unmoved by some of the complacency the BBC often has when it talks about itself- talking about doing things “only the BBC can do”. This list is much more limited than is often presented as being. I think there is still value to a national broadcaster funded by some kind of national levy- but if the BBC cannot or will not defend itself, and if it will not stand true for a truly radical concept: fearlessly impartial journalism, not fearful management of impartiality, then it will fade away. And it’ll deserve to.

• And Mark Urban, another former Newsnight journalist, says in a post on his Substack that there is some substance in the concerns raised by Michael Prescott.

For most of the time I worked on Newsnight a lively spirit of contrarianism, an ability to set aside one’s own prejudices, a commitment to seeking a diversity of views, and having a longer production day in which to debate a topic, worked in our favour. It was balanced on most issues, particularly domestic politics.

But more recently, and in common with every other big developed world news organisation I know, generational change brought a younger, more dirigiste kind of progressivism onto the team. The language of ‘lived experience’, ‘don’t be a bystander’, and formulas such as ‘silence is violence’, entered the editorial conversation.

Thus I was in a meeting where one producer with strong views on trans issues tried to veto an interview bid for JK Rowling, saying she was “very problematic” (she didn’t want to come on anyway). On different occasion another of our journalists told Rod Liddle, who did make it on to the show, to his face that they were dead against inviting him on, triggering a (justified) complaint from the columnist.