The BBC is democratic infrastructure, not a culture-war trophy | Open Government

The simultaneous resignations of the BBC’s Director General and CEO of News are more than an institutional crisis. They are a stress test of our commitment to protecting democratic infrastructure under pressure.

The Panorama edit on President Trump’s speech was an editorial failure. It demanded an immediate, transparent correction. Yet that correction was delayed, compounding the error, and taking risks with public trust. The calls for answers are justified.

But responding to editorial failure by questioning the BBC’s existence is like responding to a surgical error by arguing we no longer need hospitals. The real question is whether we understand what we lose when a society can no longer produce and share trustworthy information at scale.

The BBC as Epistemic Infrastructure

The BBC remains one of the few institutions with the reach, standards, and residual public trust to counter coordinated misinformation and disinformation. 

It functions as core epistemic infrastructure – a vital mechanism through which society produces and shares reliable information.

When that infrastructure is weakened, captured, or cowed into self-censorship, the vacuum is not filled by perfect neutrality. It is filled by narrower interests – political, commercial, or foreign – that are less constrained by accuracy, fairness, or the public interest.

This is not a defence of the status quo. It is a recognition that when we weaken independent public service journalism, we are not settling scores with ‘the BBC.’ We are dismantling our shared information immune system and lowering our own defences as a democracy.

What transparent accountability actually requires

So yes: investigate this episode fully. Publish the findings. Set out, in public, what went wrong and how decisions were made. Strengthen editorial standards, corrections processes, and governance.

But that must go hand in hand with defending the BBC’s independence from partisan pressure. That means scrutiny of Board appointments, conflicts of interest, and any drift towards a state broadcaster in all but name – or a culture where editors fear political retaliation more than they fear getting the facts wrong.

Transparency without independence is performative. Independence without accountability is complacency. We need both.

A choice about what we protect

This moment will reveal whether we still understand the BBC’s constitutional role: not as a culture-war trophy to be captured, but as shared infrastructure that enables democratic life.

The question is not whether the BBC should be above criticism. It is whether we can sustain institutions capable of holding power to account – including their own – when doing so is politically inconvenient.

If we turn this crisis into an opportunity to break, rather than repair, one of the few remaining institutions with the capacity for this work, we will have failed the test of democratic resilience.

Published on Open Government UK here.