Tim Davie, director general of the BBC, and Deborah Turness, executive director of news, have resigned following accusations of political bias at the corporation. In particular, these relate to the editing of an episode of Panorama about the January 6 insurrection, which, according to US President Donald Trump, misrepresented his image.
His departure is the last and most dramatic chapter in a story that goes back years. At first glance, the decision might seem like accountability from the top.
“Some mistakes have been made and as CEO I must take full responsibility,” Davie stated in his resignation message. However, Davie’s departure also highlights the problems that plagued the BBC for years as it tried to cope with a loss of trust.
The data reveals a clear and worrying story: the problem is not just what the BBC does, but how it is perceived by divided audiences.
Trust in the BBC is strongly conditioned by political identity. A survey I and colleagues conducted of 11,170 people in the UK, conducted between December 2022 and June 2024, showed notable differences between the perception of the BBC between those who belonged to left-wing and right-wing parties.
Liberal Democrat voters scored an average of 4.54 on a confidence scale of one to seven. Labor voters scored an average of 3.88. Trust among conservative voters was lower, with a mean of 3.17. It should be noted that the average was only 2.16 for Brexit party voters. The results date back to a time before the Brexit party became Reform UK, and before this party dominated the polls.
In other words, segments of the electorate that already felt most distanced from the BBC are now among those with the most political influence.
This poses a profound challenge to legitimacy. The station is losing the trust of the same audiences who, through the ballot box, increasingly shape the political environment in which it operates.
This helps explain why the crisis broke out. The political currents that distrusted the BBC for years are no longer marginal, but central to national politics.
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BBC and political world views
When asking respondents to place themselves on a political spectrum from left to right, we observed similar patterns. Trust peaked on the centre-left, declined in the centre, and remained low on the right. This pattern clearly indicates that trust in the BBC is neither uniform nor develops in a vacuum.
In our research, we found that these partisan fault lines were not evident in Japanese public broadcasting, suggesting that something specific is happening in the UK. In Japan, attitudes toward NHK (the equivalent of the BBC) cut across political lines, with conservatives and progressives reporting similar levels of trust.
This contrast points to different political cultures. In Japan, public broadcasting still retains an aura of neutrality linked to institutional continuity, while in the UK the BBC became a symbolic battleground in wider culture wars. The British media landscape is more openly adversarial, and perceptions of bias are now interpreted through partisan identity rather than journalistic performance.
Conservative or Brexit-friendly respondents appear to perceive the BBC as metropolitan and institutionally liberal. On the left and centre-left, the BBC still retains a cushion of credibility, but those holdouts will diminish. This is not simply “bias” or “impartiality” in the strict sense; it’s about legitimacy in different political worldviews.
The fact that two senior officials have resigned should not make us think that the problem has been solved. On the contrary, what this moment reveals is that the BBC’s challenge is not only managerial, but also political and cultural.
Data from the TrustTracker project shows that trust in the BBC is already deeply polarised. A change in leadership alone is unlikely to rebuild it. Instead, the BBC must address how it is perceived, by whom and why. Otherwise, it risks losing what sets it apart: its role as a truly shared public broadcaster in a deeply divided society.
*Steven David Pickering is Honorary Professor of International Relations at Brunel University London.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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