There’s been skillful work in journalism’s dark arts on display in the UK this past week, as the nasty British right-wing media pack tore down two senior BBC executives. The right-wing culture warriors will be celebrating big time.

They reckon they’ve put a big dent in Britain’s most trusted and most used news media with the scalps of director-general Tim Davie and director of news Deborah Turness.

Best of all, the London Daily Telegraph was able to make it look like an inside job (leaning into a paean of outrage from a former part-time “standards” adviser), hiding its hit job behind the pretence of serious investigative journalism.

For the paper long dubbed the Torygraph, it’s just another day of pulling down the country’s centrist institutions for not being right wing enough in the destructive, highly politicised world of British news media.

Sure, there’s criticisms to be made of the BBC’s news output. There’s plenty of research and commentary that pins the broadcaster for leaning over backwards to amplify right-wing talking points over hot-button issues like immigration and crime. (ABC insiders here in Australia call it the preemptive buckle.)

Most recently, for example, a Cardiff University report last month found that nearly a quarter of BBC News programmes included Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — far more coverage than similar-sized parties like the centrist Liberal Democrats or the Greens received.

It’s why there are mixed views about Davie (who started in the marketing rather than the programme-making side of the business), while the generally respected Turness is being mourned and protested more widely.

BBC’s damage-control plan
The resignations flow from the corporation’s damage-control plan around an earlier — and more genuine — BBC scandal: the 2020 expose that then rising star Martin Bashir had forged documents to nab a mid-1990s Princess Diana interview. You know the one: the royal-rocking “there were three of us in the marriage” one.

The Boris Johnson government grabbed onto the scandal as an opportunity to drive “culture change”, as then Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden put it in an interview in Murdoch’s The Times. As part of that change, the BBC board (almost always the villain in BBC turmoil) decided to give the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee a bit of a hand, by adding an external “adviser”.

Enter Michael Prescott, a former News Corp political reporter before moving on to PR and lobbying. Not a big BBC gig (it pays $30,000 a year), but it came with the fancy title of “Editorial Adviser”.

Roll forward four years: new government, new board, new BBC scandal. Prescott’s term ended last July. But he left a land-mine behind: a 19-page jeremiad, critiquing the BBC and its staff over three of the right’s touchstone issues: Trump, Gaza and trans people.

It fingered the BBC’s respected Arab programming for anti-Israel bias and smeared LGBTQIA+ reporters for promoting a pro-trans agenda.

Last week, his letter turned up (surprise!) — all over the Telegraph’s front pages, staying there every day since last Tuesday, amplified by its partner on the right, the Daily Mail, helped along with matching deplora-quotes from conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and demands for answers from the Tory MP who chairs the House of Commons Culture Standing Committee.

The one stumble sustaining the outrage? Back in November 2024, on the BBC’s flagship Panorama immediately before the US presidential election, snippets of Trump’s speech on the day of the January 6 riot had been spliced together, bringing together words which had been spoken 50 minutes apart.

Not for the first time, heads have rolled at the BBC following a puffed-up scandal pushed by the UK’s Tory press. Will the ABC learn the lessons of its British compatriot? https://t.co/nteARbd2M3

— Crikey (@crikey_news) November 11, 2025

Carelessness . . . or bias?
Loose editing? Carelessness? Or (as the cacophony on the right insist) demonstrable anti-Trump bias?

The real problem? The loose editing took the report over one of the right’s red lines: suggesting — however lightly — that Trump was in any way responsible for what happened at the US Capital that day.

Feeding the right’s fury, last Thursday the BBC released its findings that a newsreader’s facial expression when she changed a script on-air from “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” laid the BBC “open to the interpretation that it indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans identity”.

Even as the British news media has deteriorated into the destructive, mean-spirited beast that it has become, outdated syndication arrangements mean Australia’s legacy media has to pretend to take it seriously. And our own conservative media just can’t resist joining in the mother country’s culture wars.

An Australian Financial Review opinion piece by the masthead’s European correspondent Andrew Tillett took the opportunity to rap the knuckles of the ABC, the BBC and “their alleged cabals of leftist journalists and content producers”, while Jacquelin Magnay at The Australian called for a clean-out at the BBC due to its pivot “from providing factual news to becoming an activist for the trans lobby and promoting pro-Gaza voices”.

Trump, of course, was not to be left out of the pile-on, with his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling the BBC “100 percent fake news” — and giving the UK Telegraph another front page to keep the story alive for another day. Overnight, Trump got back into the headlines as he announced his trademark US$1 billion demand on media that displeases him.

It’s not the first time Britain’s Tory media have brought down a BBC boss for being insufficiently right wing. Back in 1987, Thatcher appointed ex-Daily Mail boss Marmaduke Hussey as BBC chair. Within three months, he shocked the niceties of British institutional life when he fired director-general Alastair Milne over the BBC’s reporting on the conservative government.

Here we are almost 40 years later: another puffed-up scandal. Another BBC head falling to the outrage of the British Tory press.

Christopher Warren is an Australian journalist and Crikey’s media correspondent. He was federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) until April 2015, and is a past president of the International Federation of Journalists. This article was first published by Crikey and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENT: By Adrian Blackburn

After something of a love/hate relationship with The New Zealand Herald since I joined as a cadet reporter in 1957, I have decided to show some love by taking up this week a one-year $199 subscription to the paper’s new premium digital content offer.

This is in the context of a keen newshound who had made the Herald site for more than 15 years his alternative to a paid sub, with just the occasional purchase of a Saturday print Herald.

Good sign in terms of efficiency: the nzherald.co.nz website immediately (within seconds) enabled me to read the full David Fisher piece on the French beacon built on the Chathams which I had already open on my laptop.

READ MORE: NZ Herald launches premium paywall – how will it impact on other media?

When minutes later I spotted David’s piece spruiked on his FB page I thought I might have found a workaround for those unprepared to pay, but the same conditions (roughly only first 100 words free) still applied.

Earlier I confirmed that the new syndication agreements Granny has signed with the New York Times, Financial Times, The Times (UK) and the Harvard Business Review are not (as I suspected) in the too-good-to-be-true category of offering full digital access to their websites.

The Herald will just select some content to publish as it has done for years with existing agreements with the Daily Telegraph (UK), Washington Post and South China Morning Post (SCMP). Fair enough.

Put in context
Just to put the Herald’s Premium payment in context, you can get

Much of the Financial Times digitally for $NZ6.45 p.w. (or $11.25 for the lot),

Full Tele for GBP2 after a month free

The Harvard Business Review $NZ23 per month

The Washington Post US$45 per year (some free articles) but a separate payment for the archive

NY Times a few free articles, then US$1 p.w. (special offer, normally $3).

For Anglophiles the availability of 200 years of news archives of The Times makes its GBP5 per month (after a month free trial) look pretty inviting.

And the SCMP (now apparently owned by the Alibaba online sales empire) seems to offer full free access, including 20 years of archives.

I’ll be interested to see if the Herald experience persuades me to renew in a year’s time. As renewals roll over automatically I’ll need to be vigilant to cancel in good time.

Adrian Blackburn is lifelong journalist and writer. Staff writer on many publications, including The NZ Herald, Sydney Morning Herald, BBC World Service, Beaverbrook Newspapers, NZ Listener and NZ Woman’s Weekly. Author of The Shoestring Pirates (Hodder and Stoughton, 1974) a history of pirate Radio Hauraki. This brief commentary was originally a Facebook posting on Kiwi Journalists Association and is republished here with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

THE FIRST OF THREE MEMORIALS for courageous and inspiring journalist, Yasmine Ryan, will be held in Istanbul at the Conrad Hotel on Sunday, 3 December between 2-3pm. A second memorial is due to be held in Tunis (date and location yet to be confirmed).

A memorial will also be held in London, United Kingdom on Monday 11 December from 5:30pm-7pm, exact location TBD.

* Givealittle page for contributions to Yasmine Ryan’s family *

* Goodbye to a good soul – by Paul G. Buchanan (KiwiPolitico) *

* Journalist Yasmine Ryan’s death in Istanbul fall shocks colleagues (AsiaPacificReport.nz) *

Always happiest with a pencil in his hand, Malcolm Evans has been a professional cartoonist since the 60s and is one of the best in New Zealand. Approaching that milestone himself now, he tells everyone he’s twenty eight and often behaves like someone half that age. His cartoons are featured in The Daily Blog, Asia Pacific Report, Pacific Journalism Review and many publications.