This is not a GC win. This thread is really really overestimating the impact of (what felt like) the blanket positive reporting and tone on gender identity issues from whole of the BBC, not just in news, on these highest possible profile resignations of the DG and CEO of News. That’s not happening because of a GC reasons. It’s about much broader politics. The way the Tories and Reform are trying to claim they’re somehow the GC party is laughable.
It did feel for a long time that it was positive coverage only for the trans activists at the BBC. I complained to the BBC like many others on here.
That was a political position that the BBC should not have taken on so uncritically, but it’s also important to remember that it was the BBC who paid for and aired Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes’ work at Newsnight, raising on mainstream broadcast media for the first time the many concerns about the Tavistock GIDS and labelling and medicating young people as ‘trans kids’.
That was the very a win for the BBC, to provide the very first mainstream investigative reporting in the UK on this key issue. The Times similarly led the way among the newspaper pack. The BBC’s output on this was not then followed up by the rest of the broadcast media, as was the Times’ reporting led by Janice Turner not followed up by the rest of the newsprint press. Which shows the hostile climate that they broadcast it in.
Obviously yes it all should all have happened years earlier but it’s also important to register when reporting is the first and the only and that has to remain a matter praise for the BBC. The growing mainstream media coverage and the legal cases (Keira Bell onwards) are I think what has really turned this juggernaut around. It’s not the politicians have suddenly taken women’s rights seriously. Otherwise we’d see different improvements in health, education and welfare, policing, childcare rights and provision, diplomacy and international development work etc. Everything really.
The reason the whole trans activist movement has been able to capture every major institution in the UK, is because the UK is a massively sexist country. That’s going to take decades to change.
This institutional capture regarding the latest modern form of sexism and homophobia, gender identity politics, was successful for years under the short-lived Tory—Lib Dem Coaliition and then under the successive Tory govs that the UK had from 2010-2024.
So much so that under the massive Tory majority in Parliament we had, Theresa May as PM very very nearly brought in Self ID to the UK. It was a UK government proposal that this should happen.
The issue was systemic and not dependent on party affiliation simply because sexism is systemic and not dependent on party affiliation. Therefore, not a BBC specific problem. Yes, still a massive problem. But we need to be objective in judgement of it.
The wider influence of transactivism is only now slowly waning even at the NHS, and in UK schools and among UK employers. This is evidence that this sexist homophobic genderist politics goes way, way wider than who is running the BBC at any one time and speaks to something absolutely baked into our misogynistic culture.
These resignations at the BBC yesterday are more about the fact that Boris Johnson’s appointees at the BBC as NEDs have gained traction and if that’s good or bad.
It is at the same time objectively true that the BBC has had a series of editorial crisises and has responded far too slowly to them. Which doesn’t say good things about a united or healthy management culture at the BBC but again given the globally high profile nature of the BBC upper levels of board management those relationships are always going to be a war zone. And nobody would want to have groupthink there. The BBC is massive and as such it will always make mistakes, and the key is how it responds to them and actively learns from them. That is about good management at all levels.
The pendulum is swinging way too far today though. Because they haven’t even yet responded to the resignations from yesterday. There’s news coverage now- including on the BBC, about how the DG job is impossible to do or about whether we need to keep the BBC at all in this day and age.
It would be disastrous for the UK and make us more impoverished and irrelevant, and useful idiots to whatever authoritarian might find us helpful, if we didn’t have the BBC with its impartiality remit. I think most of the time, on most issues (but not women’s rights obviously) it treads carefully and appropriately. We’re at high risk of throwing out baby with bathwater which would make the authoritarians and extremists extremely happy. It’s a time for cool heads and diversity of views in broadcasting to be protected.