GORDON Rayner, the Telegraph journalist who broke the BBC bias story, has said he expects that more senior figures will have to go.
He said the BBC’s chairman and its global head of news should go and that the new Director General will have to “reset the whole corporation” because Tim Davie failed to tackle bias during his five-year tenure.
Rayner told GB News: “Tim Davie, when it became obvious what his response had been to that Panorama documentary, that he knew about it months ago, that he did absolutely nothing about it when he found out about it, and also that the culture that he’s created at the BBC was what allowed this to happen in the first place, because the BBC journalists thought they could get away with this sort of thing.
“It did feel as if Tim Davie’s position was going to become untenable. I wasn’t sure whether that would be something that would happen quickly or not. He was trying to cling on. I thought he may have waited until Parliament has had committee meetings and brought him to give evidence, but it did feel as though his days were numbered from then on, yes.”
Asked if he thought other people could go, he said: “Yeah, I don’t think they could have contended just with Deborah Turness. I think Tim Davie was the person who set the tone.
GORDON RAYNER GB News.jpeg
“I think Samir Shah is in trouble as well, because he was also told about this Panorama program and all the other things that we’ve reported on, and he did nothing as well. So he’s not exactly got a clean pair of hands in all of this.
“Jonathan Munro, who is the global director of news content, he’s in a lot of trouble. I think he was the chap who, when this Panorama programme was raised in a standards meeting, said the viewers hadn’t been misled. He said it was just normal editing.
“Well, if he thinks that’s normal editing, then that’s quite worrying. And I wonder where he goes from here. And of course, we don’t know what’s happening to the people who made that Panorama programme. No sign yet of them being disciplined or of anybody losing their job. They were the ones who started all of this.”
On Panorama making a programme about Nigel Farage, Rayner said: “I think it’s very hard to see how Panorama could put out a programme about Nigel Farage in the current climate. Because, as we’ve seen, the whole reason that this happened, is that there is this culture at the BBC.
“We know that far too many of their staff bring an agenda to work. They don’t want to hear from other points of view, and they don’t think they need to hear from other points of view.
“I think for them to make a program about Nigel Farage, they’d be very likely to go down the same route they did with Trump, where not only – let’s just set aside editing, but that Trump programme, part of the reason that it was looked at in the first place was because Michael Prescott, who wrote that memo that you’ve been talking about, saw the programme.
“He thought, this looks really off, because they had something like ten people criticising Trump, only one person who was a Trump supporter. He asked them to look at it again, and that was how the editing issue came out. I can’t see that they wouldn’t be tempted to do a similar thing with Nigel Farage, in terms of the number of pro and anti-Farage people they’d have on.”
He said Tim Davie did not think there was anything wrong with the Panorama programme on Trump: “It’s not just PR, it’s the belief from people like Tim Davie that that somehow there wasn’t anything wrong, and if Tim Davie thought there was nothing wrong when he was told about that six months ago, then that’s a large part of the reason he’s had to go.
“But then when we pointed it out and reported on this a week ago, I think he still didn’t think there was anything wrong. He thought we were somehow getting at him. The right response would have been to have apologised there and then.
“I was very surprised at the response we got from the BBC when we put this story to them last week. They basically said we don’t comment on leaks, and this came from a meeting where people have different opinions.
“I expected them at least to say we made a mistake. We got this wrong. There was nothing like that. They were hoping this story would just go away. It hasn’t, and so he has had to do the right thing at the end.”
He added: “The problem is they don’t really believe they’ve done anything wrong. A lot of these people, they only go when it becomes obvious that they don’t have the support any more of perhaps the board or the viewers.
“They can’t see where the problems are, and that’s why the person who takes it over from Tim Davie is going to have an enormous job on their hands, because they’re going to have to reset the whole corporation. They’re going to have to tell everybody that works there that impartiality and trust are absolutely paramount, and then they’re going to have to back that up with actions.
“Tim Davie said all this when he got the job five years ago, but he then allowed people to just do what they wanted. He didn’t have the backbone to sack people if they stepped out of line. Look at what happened with Gary Lineker, for example.
“The new person is going to have to have an awful lot more guts and be prepared to actually sack people if they don’t put impartiality at the heart of everything they do.”