the BBC and why it needs defending

even if you don't always agree with it, and sometimes it does things that you think are outright terrible

My first ever non-fiction book Don’t Burn Anyone At The Stake Today is published later this week. If you’re planning to buy a copy (I deliberately made it fairly short and sweet, and so it’s a nice size for a stocking stuffer!) it really really helps if you pre-order, there are lots of options of places to do that from here.

A friend - who’s read the book - texted me yesterday to say “I see they’ve decided to burn Tim Davie at the stake today”. And so I thought it was probably the right time to put this extract from the book on Substack. I wrote the book because once I spotted the historical parallels with what’s going on now I felt I wanted to grab everyone in the world by the lapels and say ‘this is what’s happening right now! We don’t have to make the same stupid mistakes again!’

The book is about what we’re living through right now, with the internet, social media and AI and what we can learn from previous similar information crises, like what happened after the invention of printing and after the invention of writing. An ‘information crisis’ is what happens when a new technology - like writing, printing or the internet - means that each of us encounters every day enormously more information than we did even a few years earlier. Hundreds of times more. So much that we can’t navigate it and it becomes hard to tell truth from falsehood and the important from the trivial.

Some of the things that happen are very predictable - the tidal wave of new information makes us feel cognitively overloaded, making us anxious and then angry. We turn on each other, form small tribes, seek out only people who agree with us about what the new information means. And we become capable of doing terrible things - both to other people (burning people at the stake) and destroying whole institutions that were really working pretty well.

I think we’re in the middle of burning stuff down which we’ll never be able to get back. Tim Davie’s resignation yesterday was part of it. We need to stop.

This extract which starts after the picture of the world in flames is about that.

detail from An Eruption of Vesuvius, Johan Christian Dahl,1824. source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438159

We are going through a period of profound crisis in our sources of information for absolutely predictable reasons connected to the invention of new, revolutionary technologies. In times like this it becomes much, much easier for even complex societies to break down into war and destruction. Every protective factor is important.

Institutions that are sources of basically truthful information are going to be particularly vulnerable when, inevitably, they do get something wrong. There is no such thing as an information system which never gets anything wrong. What we’re looking for is a rapid acknowledgement of the problem, lack of defensiveness, curiosity about how it happened, a focus on systems and not individuals as the way to make sure it doesn’t happen like that again. That’s the ideal.

Even with the ideal system, the nature of an information crisis is that there will be plenty of people willing to tear down a good-faith truth-seeking organization over errors, who will use an error or a bad member of that organization as evidence that nothing from that source can be trusted.

So, which institutions are we being tempted to condemn root and branch because of some mistakes and abuses? What organizations are we going to allow our rulers to condemn because we can now find out more about them than we used to and we’re horrified by some of the bad stuff that is going on? What large, trying-to-be-helpful-but-sometimes-failing association would various rulers like to break up and destroy because it represents an alternative source of authority to their own narrative and also there’s money to be made?

This is going to be different in different countries.

I think in the UK, it’s the BBC.

I want to suggest that as British people we need to understand how valuable and important the BBC is in protecting us against the worst of the information crisis, how many forces want to tear it down, and how we will never get those protections back again if we allow it to be destroyed.

This is not a defence of specific actions the BBC has taken. It is a defence of the principle that the knowledge and media landscape is vitally important to the intellectual, educational, informational health of the nation, as important as the NHS is for our physical health, and that there should be a publicly funded organization dedicated to caring for that landscape.

The BBC is not perfect. No organization of that size ever could be. It employs somewhere around 20,000 people and inevitably some of them are going to make mistakes or just be bad at their jobs. The BBC has made some terrible errors, both in its reporting of news stories, and in its employment and promotion of some people who were bullies or actual abusers. The BBC’s role in keeping Jimmy Savile in the public eye, in giving him a platform to present himself very specifically as the best friend to all children and the one who could make all their dreams come true is … it’s just horrific. It’s upsetting, it’s disgraceful, it’s nauseating.

If you think about programming that is important to you or a subject on which you’re an expert, you can probably think of something just laughably false or extremely bad that the BBC has broadcast about it. To take a minor example, I remember an academic talking on some radio programme about ‘the Judeo-Christian idea of everlasting hell’ which … well, Jews don’t believe in everlasting hell, so that was just stupid. No one challenged it. The BBC does this sort of thing all of the time.

I am not defending specific actions of particular producers or broadcasters, nor an individual stupid view I’ve heard on the BBC, nor abusers, nor bullies. It is a defence of the principle that the knowledge and media landscape is vitally important to the intellectual, educational, informational health of the nation, and that there should be a publicly funded organization dedicated to caring for that landscape. That it should be dedicated to producing true information, in an interesting way, and to curating media for us that is both entertaining and educational. The Reithian principle – inform, educate and entertain – is a good one.

It’s not that complicated, actually. It is the same as the way British people defend the NHS. We aren’t defending Harold Shipman and the vile, despicable murders he committed. We’re not speaking up for the Alder Hey scandal, where body parts from hundreds of infants were retained without consent. We’re not defending people being left in corridors all night in pain, or long waiting lists or supercilious doctors or botched operations or bad leaflets or stupid refusal of needed prescriptions. We’re defending the principle. Healthcare, free at the point of use, for everyone.

I don’t excuse any organization that harbours abusers; there are things that can be done to safeguard, and the presence of abuse is always a sign that there have been large institutional failures. I think it’s also worth remembering that abusers and predators want to take advantage of the halo of trust in places where there is access to vulnerable people and so will tend to be attracted to working in schools and hospitals, national broadcasters, youth groups and religious leadership. ‘This large organization with a huge amount of public trust ended up harbouring a predator’ is a reason for inquiries and new systems, but it’s not necessarily an indication of fundamental rottenness.

And there are people – quite a lot of people – who are very willing to pretend that the part is the same as the whole. They are often people who will make a lot of money out of destroying the previous systems. Henry VIII may have sincerely believed that the monasteries were bad through and through. He also did get to take all of their wealth for himself when he destroyed those institutions of societal support: their libraries, chronicles and houses of learning.

At the time of writing, the wealthiest man in the world is Elon Musk. He has shown himself very willing to buy up a media organization, Twitter, and to encourage it to prioritize his viewpoints. He was willing, for example, to encourage rioting in the UK. The venerable American newspaper the Washington Post, which has been a byword for investigative reporting even against a sitting president when it broke the Watergate scandal, is now owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. On 26 February 2025, Bezos posted the following statement about ‘a change coming’ to the Washington Post’s opinion pages:

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets […] Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

I would strongly suggest that the internet does not, in fact, do that job. The internet allows every person to access precisely the opinions that most please or enrage them – being enraged is a particular form of being pleased, actually. Finding things on the internet to ‘hate read’ is a way of feeling great about yourself because you’re not as stupid and wrong as those other people. The internet allows and encourages us to either find opinions that we wildly, enthusiastically agree with or conversely the most ridiculous and objectionable and stupid forms of the views on the other side of any issue.

In every information crisis, there is a tendency to cut oneself off and look not at the community around us but at the particular information we want to look at that makes us feel comfortable and right. What we lose via giving in to that tendency is shared consensus reality. That is, a reality we all consent to. Once you’ve lost that, it’s easy to dehumanize others, to start to believe that people who disagree with you aren’t really people at all.

The job that the Washington Post and other broad-based news outlets used to do was the opposite of the box pews – it would present a range of views but each of them ideally fairly measured, reasonably sensible, at least mostly based in fact. Yes, they failed many times, sometimes catastrophically, to keep to that mission. But that was what they tried to do. The point is: when they showed us views we didn’t agree with, they were mostly not finding the worst way to present those views but the best.

This is not about a specific viewpoint. If you’re reading this thinking ‘Naomi wants me to find x view reasonable and I just don’t’: no. That’s not it. I don’t care about the specific viewpoints as much as I care about being able to have civil discourse on contentious issues.

This is about not treating people as symbols. About the sense that we are not surrounded by cretinous vicious imbeciles but mostly by careful thoughtful people who may disagree with us but usually have good reasons for doing so and with whom we could have a reasonably civilized conversation and find many points on which we do agree. I know that saying this already makes me sound like a utopian. I know that it feels right now like we probably are surrounded by cretinous vicious imbeciles a lot of the time. That’s because we’re already right in the middle of an information crisis.

This job of trying to present difficult questions in a fairly reasonable way, the job of basically trying to discover and report the truth, the job that American billionaire-owned media has given up in favour of promoting ‘personal liberties and free markets’, is the job that the BBC is still doing. It is one of a small and decreasing number of organizations still doing that. If we lose it, we will never get it back and we and the world will be quite a bit closer to the kind of fundamental breakdown of civil discourse that ends up with burning people at the stake.

It’s not that complicated. It is the same as the way British people defend the NHS. We aren’t defending Harold Shipman. We’re defending the principle. Healthcare, free at the point of use, for everyone.

In Britain we lucked into having the BBC as a result of a paternalistic kind of Empire, wealth that we acquired in often dubious ways, a particular class hierarchy. All of that is worth questioning. Every single bit of the BBC’s output is worth questioning. This is absolutely not a call for a lack of protest, in fact the opposite. An information organization is alive when it’s engaging with the people who use it, when it hears from them, when it’s the subject of debate. If you live in the UK, or if you don’t live in the UK but you enjoy or rely on the BBC’s output, keep on challenging and questioning it. Write angry letters. Write to your MP, to the Prime Minister. Demand the return of Points of View with Anne Robinson, or Robert Robinson or presumably someone else with the surname Robinson. Tony, maybe? Colin? Ask for a channel on iPlayer devoted to videos complaining about BBC programmes and answers or reflections on them from BBC producers. Just don’t give up on it.

The BBC has a million problems. It deserves challenge again and again. But the basic principle that we need a publicly funded organization to protect the informational health of the country – and to a certain extent the world – is vital. This is what defends us from the rise in utter nonsense. We really won’t know what we’ve got here until it’s gone. Try not to let it be gone.