BBC leadership is in crisis at a time of great danger

No dog-whistle distracts the British press quite like the sound of a politician blowing hard on a policy to interfere with the BBC. So it was not a surprise that, as the government headed into a weekend of heavy Brexit weather, the culture secretary, Nicky Morgan, revealed she was not entirely opposed to converting the BBC licence fee into a “Netflix-style subscription”. The licence fee is compulsory for anyone who owns a monitor that can be used as a television, and currently delivers the broadcaster £3.75bn a year (about a quarter of Netflix’s total revenue).

Off-the-cuff remarks made at a culture select committee meeting are not (thankfully) policy, and Morgan’s department later clarified that there were no plans to review the current BBC charter, which runs until 2027 – and by then, who knows which national institutions will have collapsed? But even connoisseurs of the BBC’s dangerous moments could tell you we are currently in a vintage dangerous moment.

Part of this is down to the general upheaval that every institution is currently facing, driven by a mix of unstable geopolitics and technological change; but part of it is about the simultaneous chronic leadership crisis in the government and at the BBC. In case anybody hasn’t noticed, the current government is not fully focused on the important work of long-term vision and institution-building right now. What’s more, it is temporarily led by someone who long drew a paycheck from some of the most virulent anti-BBC publications, which have a direct vested interest in dramatically reducing the level of the licence fee.

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The confusion of Brexit ought to have been a golden moment for the BBC, an opportunity to practise dazzling explanatory journalism on a nightly basis, to apply cultural balm to the ideological wounds, and to lead the UK gently through a minefield of booby-traps. Quite the opposite has happened. Caught in the crosshairs of a polarised debate about Brexit, the corporation’s news division did not seem to have either adequate authority or a robust enough strategy to make a case against the deluge of incoming influence campaigns. Its journalism, unusually, also struggled to be serious and consistent enough to meet the complex gravity of the moment.

The dynamics of neutrality and objectivity in modern journalism are under daily scrutiny, and leadership needs to be able to address criticism without bending in the political wind. News is vexing and complex – ask any editor in the US trying to navigate Donald Trump’s administration – but the mark of an important media institution is that it can catch what is thrown at it and make sense of it for its audience.

Instead, at the BBC, a percolating leadership crisis has shown the corporation to be unusually captured and inarticulate about its role – a feebleness that has infected its coverage and seems endemic in its management. Most distressingly, it is not just the external pressure that threatens a valuable national asset: the BBC has self-sabotaged on an astonishingly regular basis. It has a deep bench of phenomenally talented staff, but even their patience and loyalty is finite.

The most recent head-in-hands moment was the censuring of one of its on-air presenters, Naga Munchetty, for answering a question about her experience of racial harassment from her uncensured co-presenter. The decision revealed that the BBC’s internal compass and processes about its standards and culture are broken. The director general, Tony Hall, reversed the decision only when the groundswell of reaction from his own staff and the public became unignorable.

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The Munchetty episode might seem like a minor incident, but it spoke volumes about the dysfunctional state of BBC leadership. All organisations make mistakes, embarrassing and damaging ones at that, and the default position of the BBC is to be in crisis. However, Hall’s team failed to understand the lessons of the disgraceful episode in which its most talented China expert, Carrie Gracie, resigned her position after a public row about underpayment of women. Munchetty and Gracie were both compromised by the corporation’s management failure, yet there is little sign of change at the top.

Hall returned to the BBC in 2013 as director general, following the scandal around Jimmy Savile, which led to the rapid dismissal of George Entwistle. Hall did an excellent job of stabilising the corporation over the next few years, but he never looked like a leader who was fully invested in making the BBC fit for the future. At the time, Hall made several senior appointments without observing the hiring protocol usually required by a public organisation, citing the importance of the chemistry of the team over any considerations of process. Six years later, Hall is still there and that chemistry has produced a directionless and defensive organisation.

Should he resign? In any normal circumstances, the answer ought to be yes. But the prospect of Boris Johnson appointing a successor, riddled as he is with alleged conflicts of interest and a need for “technology lessons”, is perhaps an equally dangerous prospect.

Where is the governance of the BBC in all this? One suspects their eyes are so closely on the immediate horizon they have not really thought through what is coming over the hill. National strategies for information security, the role of public media and the necessity to regulate technology platforms could not be more urgent priorities. The BBC ought to be central to any debate about a much wider plan for Britain’s cultural and political future in a very challenging climate, yet instead it risks an accidental death at the hands of those who cannot see or do not care what is at stake.