The “doctored” Trump clip that helped defenestrate BBC Director-General Tim Davie over the weekend is, in 21st-century terms, a perfect political Rorschach test. In it, two parts of the President’s speech, 52 minutes apart, were spliced together, with some crowd footage, so it looks like he was inciting his audience to physical confrontation.

To many Right-wingers, including Trump himself, the edit was propaganda designed to portray him as a riot-inciting demagogue. To Trump haters, even if it’s not an accurate representation of what he said in that particular speech it’s a fair distillation of Trumpishness, and as such true in spirit. So who is right? It’s not even a debate about the facts, but about what the facts mean.

And this is precisely the larger issue at stake for the BBC, too: not so much whether, or in which direction, the BBC is “biased”, but whether we still have any faith in the possibility of neutral, authoritative arbiters of information as such. And if the answer is “no”, what does the future look like for our supposedly neutral and impartial national broadcaster?

The fallout from the leaked dossier which drew attention to the clip, along with evidence of other editorial bias at the BBC, has triggered the resignation of the Director-General, Tim Davie along with the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Furness. It has even drawn comment from the White House, with Trump threatening legal action against the corporation and his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling it a “propaganda machine”.

Supporters of the BBC allege that the dossier is in fact a nefarious Right-wing plot to destroy the institution. Conversely, those same Right-wingers might retort that the fact these insinuations are mostly published by The Guardian supports the suspicion that the Beeb may only appear “neutral” to people whose idea of sensible centrism is Polly Toynbee. This aside, I think it’s fair to say there is an unmistakeable progressive tilt to the issues listed in the dossier, and the imputation of Left-wing bias is not totally baseless. But the problem goes deeper than bias in one direction. It is structural.

If the BBC is struggling today, it’s because, for a growing number of political issues, there is no “neutral”. All three of the dossier’s flashpoints — Trump, Gaza and gender ideology — have this quality. Trump is an archetypal case, and nowhere more divisively than in how you interpret the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For one camp, this was a peaceful turnout by patriots in defence of an election they believed stolen; to the other, it was an attempted insurrection. There’s no way both interpretations can be true.

The same goes for the conflict in Gaza, which – depending on your worldview – is either justified retaliation for an unprovoked act of mass terrorism, or genocide thinly legitimised by the actions of freedom fighters. Again, there’s no way both of these things can be true. The trans issue has the same Rorschach quality: either a person’s sex is determined by what they are, or it’s determined by what they say they are. They can’t both be true, and there’s no “both sides” compromise.

This isn’t happening because there’s something uniquely polarising about contemporary politics. The decisive change is the internet. Avant-garde commentators such as Clay Shirky were predicting back in the 2000s that people could use the internet to do away with institutional gatekeepers, unleashing a new era of popular democracy and cultural dynamism. And this did sort of happen, but not quite in the way the utopians anticipated.

The BBC is (or was) a paradigmatic example of this kind of gatekeeper. It has always been both in the business of representing what’s out there, and also of seeking to shape it. From its foundation, its remit was always patrician: to “inform, educate, and entertain”, including through the provision of (aspirationally) impartial news. Karoline Leavitt was perhaps not wholly off-piste: a pithier term for a state-owned, taxpayer-funded media giant with this improving remit might well be “propaganda machine”, for all that (as for example during the Second World War) this duty has generally been discharged in cooperation with the British people. Especially after the war, the BBC came to occupy a role contiguous with the Church of England: as diffident but still mostly trustworthy repository and delivery-mechanism for such collective morals as post-imperial Britain was able still to agree on.

Even if the rise of commercial radio and TV dented the BBC’s crown, it still stayed more or less in place — until the internet. Now, though, everything is different. The internet poses an existential threat not just to the BBC as a body, but more fundamentally to the worldview within which having a national broadcaster makes sense at all.

For one thing, internet politics has stripped geography from political debate, which is now divided much more by language than geography. This means Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, and other Anglophone communities worldwide all inhabit functionally the same public square. How, in this context, should a national broadcaster judge what counts as national news? But more important still, the internet has done as Shirky promised and “disintermediated” journalism. That is: it’s significantly reduced the power of institutional gatekeepers.

The result has been cultural dynamism, after a fashion. But it’s also revealed that the post-structuralists were actually right about “truth” being to some extent an effect of institutional power. That is: when you don’t have a powerful single arbiter of The Narrative, what you end up with may not necessarily be more truth. You might just get a Babel of competing narratives. And like market traders hawking their wares on a busy square, the incentive structures of such an information economy tend to reward the loudest voices and simplest, most vivid offers.

Lest anyone be tempted to comfort themselves with the idea that this is only a problem for “low-information voters”, think again: what the philosopher Dan Williams calls “elite misinformation” is just as rampant, and studies have shown education level to have no effect on how susceptible people are to misinformation. By way of illustration, we need only remember the bizarre assertions that came and went, week by week, during Covid-19, while at every stage the chattering classes enjoined us to “follow the science”.

Indeed it was Covid-19 that provided the inflection point in this trajectory, for the simple reason that lockdowns forced everyone online. If it feels since then that the world has gone mad, it’s not that social isolation sent us crazy. It’s that the internet ate reality. In the resulting cacophony, everyone now assembles themselves a bespoke version of reality, from a near-infinite supply of media channels, podcasts, influencers, and the like.

And because humans are mimetic — that is, we decide what we want based on what those around us want — these realities have begun to agglomerate in affinity groups. In turn, these clusters have begun to define themselves in opposition to one another, and to mount information-war manoeuvres against one another. One notable result of these skirmishes, for example, is the progressive capture of Wikipedia, which was founded as a neutral, crowdsourced online encyclopaedia but has become bitterly politicised.

This dissolution of “truth” into tribal trench warfare is now the basic structure of what we used to call “the public conversation”. Huge amounts of money, status, and political influence are already at stake in this new environment; one the BBC, which was designed as a one-to-many vehicle for transmitting respectable establishment consensus, is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate. For as in each of the flashpoint issues in the Prescott dossier, what’s at stake is often not the facts, so much as what the facts mean. And, for a national broadcaster tasked with impartial reporting, this presents an often impossible dilemma. There’s often no way to report on an issue this bitterly contested without effectively picking a “side”, which is to say an interpretation of those facts, even if only in choosing what to omit. For example (according to Prescott’s dossier) the BBC’s transgender reporting routinely centred trans experience, but omitted the voices of detransitioners.

But what is the BBC to do? The internet replaced one-to-many with many-to-many communication, and institutional gatekeepers with platform plutocrats. Now Auntie is just one voice in an increasingly noisy attention economy, and everyone just dismisses competing interpretations as lies and propaganda. The Panorama furore itself is already grist to the same disorienting mill: former Sky political editor Adam Boulton said of the edited clip that at worst the BBC was guilty of “sharp practice”, and in any case it was justified because the edit was morally accurate even if it was factually misleading. So much so, in fact, that it was “fake news to suggest Donald Trump did not egg on what happened on 6 January”. For his part, Trump’s press secretary has now declared the entire BBC to be “fake news”.

There is, in other words, nowhere to stand that isn’t someone else’s fake news. Pity the poor Beeb: when you can now search up 10 conspiratorial interpretations of every factual report, from every conceivable angle, in the time it takes to boil the kettle, how long is anyone going to go on believing in impartiality as such? You can be sure that any effort to “correct” the perceived existing Left-liberal BBC bias would simply elicit fresh accusations of “fake news” and “bias” from somewhere else. Under the circumstances, I don’t entirely blame the Director General, Tim Davie, for throwing in the towel.

More than one thing can be true simultaneously. It is surely true that many will be delighted by the opportunity these events have afforded, to put the boot into the BBC. It’s surely also true that the institution’s well-documented middle-class staffing skew exposes its employees to the blind spots and groupthink of that social milieu, and that this is often visible in editorial decisions. But it’s also true that comparatively speaking, the BBC is fighting a heroic last stand for neutrality, against perhaps insuperable has arguably already held out longer than any of its commercial counterparts, and indeed such utopian digital enterprises as Wikipedia.

As well as noting its lapses into bias, then, we might also acknowledge how very much worse this already is, almost everywhere else. But this is faint praise. “It’s not as woke as Wikipedia” may not be enough to save the BBC, as an institution, from the sucking void of Choose Your Own Reality. If it isn’t, then flawed and middle-class and sometimes irritatingly sanctimonious as it is, I suspect we will all come to regret its passing.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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