Deborah Turness on bias, the BBC, and the future of public media

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Mixed Signals from Semafor Media

Episode: Deborah Turness on Bias, the BBC, and the Future of Public Media
Date: February 27, 2026
Host: Max Tani (A), Semafor Media Editor
Co-Host: Ben Smith (B), Editor-in-Chief
Guest: Deborah Turness (C), Former CEO of BBC News; Former President of NBC News

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Overview

In this episode, Max Tani and Ben Smith are joined by Deborah Turness for her first public interview since resigning as CEO of BBC News. The conversation spans Turness’s storied career in media, the evolution of TV news, crises of trust within major newsrooms, the BBC controversy and allegations of bias, and larger questions about the future of public media. The episode provides rare transparency and directness on newsroom politics and the structural challenges facing media institutions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Deborah Turness’s Media Trajectory & US vs. UK Broadcast

• Early Impressions of US & UK Media (05:18–06:31)

  • Turness describes 1990s American broadcast news as innovative and dynamic, in contrast to the “stodgy” UK print scene of the time.
  • Noted a reversal: print media has since become more innovative, while broadcast has stagnated.

    “It was super competitive and it felt like a time of real creativity and anything was possible” (Turness, 05:36) “Now it’s the broadcast industry that’s stood still and the print brands… have really innovated.” (Turness, 06:13)

• Lessons from the Lewinsky Scandal (06:47–08:06)

  • Monica Lewinsky as “patient zero” of the social media era.

  “What I learned from the Lewinsky scandal is that... we rushed to judgment and social media platforms and the Internet rushed to judgment very early.” (Turness, 07:26)

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2. Leadership & Crisis at NBC News

• Managing the Ann Curry Firing & Audience Trust (08:06–10:31)

  • Turness’s approach at NBC: Deep audience research, emotional connection, emphasis on journalistic substance and uplift.

    “They wanted substance. They wanted connection. And they wanted uplift.” (Turness, 09:26)

• The Brian Williams Scandal (10:35–12:49)

  • Navigating a top anchor’s credibility crisis.
  • U.S. media brands were more resilient then; Turness thinks a scandal would have a bigger impact now.

  “America is a land of second chances. ...I’m not sure you could have done that in the UK market.” (Turness, 12:32)

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3. BBC Controversy, Impartiality, and Bias

• Resignation Circumstances (12:49–13:17)

  • Turness resigned after controversy over an edited Trump documentary.
  • She firmly rejects the idea of institutional anti-Trump bias at the BBC.

  “I don’t accept the charge that it was a sign of institutional bias.” (Turness, 13:19)

  • Asserts impartiality as core to the BBC’s DNA:

  “Impartiality is in the BBC’s DNA. ...to weaponize impartiality... it’s actually a force to be reckoned with.” (Turness, 13:39)

• On Editorial Balance for Polarizing Issues (14:48–17:19)

  • The BBC receives criticism from both the left and right.

    “In fact, on Israel, Gaza, there is more criticism of the BBC being pro-Israeli.” (Turness, 15:13)

  • Acknowledges ideological gaps between newsroom staff and the public, emphasizes need for “radical transparency” (e.g., BBC Verify):

    “You’ve got to work even harder to maintain that impartiality and you’ve got to intervene in ways...” (Turness, 15:37)

  • Her own interventions: Insisted on giving populist leader Nigel Farage primetime exposure:

    “I personally overruled internal editorial policy to give Nigel Farage ... primetime exposure...” (Turness, 17:03)

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4. Structural and Political Challenges at the BBC

• On Board Politics and Governance (20:42–23:46)
  • Ben Smith frames Turness’s exit as either: a failure of internal action on bias, or as a political coup.
  • Turness avoids litigious detail but expresses concern about political appointees dominating the BBC board:

    “I think I wouldn’t be the first person to say that having political appointees on the board of the BBC is something that I think needs to be looked at.” (Turness, 23:07)

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5. The Future of Public Media

• Surviving in a Polarized Era (23:46–26:53)
  • Comparison to US defunding of PBS/NPR—are public institutions doomed?
  • The BBC’s broad centrality in UK society provides some insulation, but modernization is vital.

  “What protects public organizations ... is to modernize. ...I went to the BBC to bring in streaming…” (Turness, 24:42)

  • Notes pivotal trends: shift from trust in institutions to trust in individual creators, need for big organizations to embrace authenticity and relationships with audiences.

  "You've got to stop managing the news you're making and actually let your talent and your journalists have a relationship with your audiences." (Turness, 25:51)

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6. Post-Interview Analysis & Reflections

• On the Scandal’s Impact (27:44–35:44)
  • Smith and Tani recap that the controversy revolved around a documentary edit that made Trump seem to egg on protesters. They deem the editorial error serious but not uncommon; the leak of a critical internal memo heightened the crisis.
  • Turness’s candor in acknowledging staff/public disconnect is rare, compared to most American newsroom leaders.

    “She just said, obviously there's not a lot of Reform supporters at the BBC, so we have to be extra careful...” (Smith, 29:57)

  • Both suggest public broadcasters are under sustained right-wing populist attack and must modernize to survive.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Broadcast vs. Print:

  “Broadcast... has stood still and it’s actually the print brands that have really innovated.”
  — Deborah Turness (06:13)

• On Newsroom Culture and Bias:

  “I think that the newsrooms are not in lockstep with... rapid, sudden social change... What that means is you've got to work even harder to maintain that impartiality.”
  — Deborah Turness (15:34)

• On Being Extra Careful on Bias:

  “Obviously there’s not a lot of Reform supporters at the BBC, so we have to be extra careful about that blind spot. Like, I think that’s an honest thing to say.”
  — Ben Smith (29:57)

• On Public Media Survival:

  “What protects public organizations from this kind of constant attack... is to modernize.”
  — Deborah Turness (24:42)

• On the Uniqueness of the BBC:

  “The BBC is the central institution of British journalism. ...If there's a big fire in Glasgow, they're not going to go send a reporter to that. Like, you just take the BBC coverage.”
  — Ben Smith (31:15)

• On US Defunding of NPR/PBS:

  “The defunding of public media... flipped pretty much within a few months... and then one year it just didn't...”
  — Max Tani (32:13)

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Timestamps of Important Sections

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|-------------------------------------------------------| | 05:18–06:31| Turness’s first experiences in US media | | 06:46–08:06| Lewinsky scandal and media judgment | | 08:06–10:31| Trust crisis and Ann Curry firing at NBC | | 10:35–12:49| The Brian Williams scandal and resilience | | 12:49–14:48| BBC documentary controversy and impartiality | | 14:48–17:19| Balancing coverage, polarization & BBC Verify | | 20:42–23:46| Political pressure and BBC board governance | | 23:46–26:53| Future of public media, modernization, new dynamics | | 27:44–35:44| Analysis, resignation debate, and public broadcaster threats |

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Tone & Language

• Conversational, nuanced, and at times blunt — particularly regarding newsroom politics and ideological divisions.
• Turness combines diplomatic caution (around legal issues) with rare directness about media bias, internal culture, and the need for transformation.
• Hosts emphasize the rarity and timeliness of these candid admissions in the present polarized context.

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Listener Value

This episode pulls back the curtain on the real dynamics behind one of the biggest recent stories in public media. The discussion is honest, reflective, and rich with practical insights—ideal for anyone interested in media governance, impartial journalism, political threats to public broadcasting, or the difficult realities of leading a legacy news organization in an era of suspicion and fracture.

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me as always from our DCHQ this time is our editor in chief, Ben Smith. Ben, we're recording this on Thursday. Yesterday, we spoke to a lot of members of the DC Media elite as part of our trust in Media Summit here. We had FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. We had the CEO of Axel Springer, Matthias Dofner. We had the executive editor of the Washington Post, Matt Murray, and we had today's guest, Deborah Cherness. But how do you feel like the whole event went?

[B]

Honestly, not to glaze you, Max, but I thought you did some just really interesting hard interviews with the editor in chief of the Washington Post, with the CEO of Axel Springer that I hope people will watch on YouTube, like. Cause some of them sometimes with these interviews, like Matt Murray didn't say a lot, but I feel like you got to the emotional truth of what it's like to be the editor of the Washington Post.

[A]

It is a good point that, you know, a lot of times the challenge with these types of events is that, you know, you're asking the tough, newsworthy questions to people on stage and they basically can't answer them, which is something that'll come up in today's episode as well. But yeah, the value is kind of both getting them to say nothing on the record and also. Right. Picking up on the general vibe, a

[B]

lot of very different and creative ways of not answering questions. Like Matthias Duffner, the Axel Springer CEO, kind of waged psychological warfare on you, Matt. Just sort of emoted, you know, Deborah Chernesque dodged in a fairly highbrow way. Brendan Carr just steamrolled me a lot of different ways to do it.

[A]

Well, as previously mentioned, our guest this week is Deborah Turness. She was the former CE of the BBC, but recently resigned amid a controversy over the editing of a documentary about Trump having to do with January 6th. But before that, she also ran NBC News and has this really long storied career in television history. Ben, Deborah is somebody who, you know, have known for a long time, haven't always had the greatest relationship with her, but she was gracious enough to come here now. And she's a fan of the show, which is. Which is always great to hear. But why were you so excited to book her for our event and have her as the guest on Today's show.

[B]

Deborah has always sort of been a live wire. She was a TV producer in the 90s for ITN, which was the kind of edgy, alternative British broadcaster, cable network, and was brought in as a total outsider to run NBC, where my main experience with her was that she, like, very laudably had the back of her talent, which meant calling me and screaming at me when I wrote about them, which is, like, appropriate, which is what I do when somebody's mean to you, Max. And in a world of often kind of cautious suits, she's kind of a interesting character, a big character. I was rereading an old Vanity Fair profile which said that she had rock chick vibes, whatever that means. But she's like, she took as a compliment. And she then wound up running, you know, the most staid and cautious and enormous institution in global media, which is BBC News. She resigned in November under pressure amid a controversy over the edit of a documentary about Donald Trump on January 6th and amid, you know, broader political pressure on the BBC. And this was her first public interview since her resignation. So, you know, it was a big news moment in Britain, actually. But really also, you know, I think it's a moment when thinking about these big central public institutions. There's nothing like the BBC. And, you know, it was an opportunity to get into that question of what is the future of that kind of media.

[A]

It's gonna feel a little bit different than our regular podcast interviews because it's something that we recorded beforehand on stage, but we still thought it was such an interesting conversation that we wanted to drop directly here in the feed. So we'll hear from Deborah Terness right after this break.

[B]

Hey, mixed signals listeners. If you have, like me, spent a bit of time listening to marketing podcasts, you will know that many of them are just a bit too on message, filled with PR fluff and recycled talking points. That's why I'm excited by a new show from our generally quite blunt friend Josh Spanier, Google's VP of marketing. It's called Frontier cmo. It's from Think with Google. Josh is hosting unfiltered, honest conversations with the most disruptive minds in marketing and tech about what's really happening, what's failed, what's next, and the truths you need to know to stay ahead. These are your notes from the Frontier search for Frontier CMO from Think with Google. Wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube,

[C]

Please welcome Deborah Turnis, former CEO of BBC News, and Ben Smith, co founder and editor in chief of Semaphore

[B]

Wow, that's, that's, that's a lot more. APPLAUSE than Brendan Parr got. Sorry, Brendan. So, Deborah, you've, you've had a couple of the biggest jobs in, in television, President of NBC News and of the BBC. But. And we first met when you were at NBC News, I believe, unhappy about a story, but that's, that's another.

[C]

And you were at BuzzFeed.

[B]

Yeah, and she called to yell at me. That's great. You always got to stand up for

[C]

your people, but we've become friends.

[B]

But your first entry into American media was you were a young producer for ITN in the 1990s here in Washington. And I'm curious, in your estimation, has American media, American television, got better or worse since then?

[C]

Oh, good question. Yes. I was here in the Clinton White House years living in dc. I always think DC gets a bad rap, but actually it's a fantastic place to live. And my view was at the time, I remember feeling how exciting the world of broadcast news was. We're talking in the sort of the 90s, mid to late 90s. There was so much raw energy and it was super competitive and it felt like a time of real creativity and anything was possible. Whereas I thought that the sort of the print industry was incredibly like stolid and staid and stodgy and it was as much as you could do to plow through a Wall Street Journal headline with all the sub clauses. And I was like, that's not news. Emma Tucker has sorted that out now, as we can see. But I think there's been something of a reversal because I think it's actually the broadcast industry that has stood still and it's actually the print brands that have really innovated and advanced and we see that obviously the highest order example is in New York Times.

[B]

And when people look back, I think people do look back with rose tinted glasses, often at the, you know, the good old days when broadcast and, and print were, among other things, profitable. You also covered and were very close to the Lewinsky Clinton story.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

What did you learn from that?

[C]

If you really want to know what I learned from it, most of all because I was here 94 to 97, I went back to the UK and then Lewinsky story broke in 98 and I came back to cover it. And not long afterwards I approached Monica because I kind of figured that she was obviously smart enough to become a White House intern and that there was something that everyone was missing. And I actually asked her if she would. I was running a slightly alternative news operation at the time in London, targeting young audiences. And I asked her if she'd come and be my US correspondent for the next election, for the US presidential election. Obviously she declined because that was dangerous territory for her. But we did make a documentary together and we traveled across the U.S. she said, I'll do it if you'll be the producer. So we actually made a documentary for a UK channel. And I learned, and I think we've all seen now that you know Monica from her TED Talk and how she's rebuilt her Persona, her career. What I learned from the Mincy scandal is that she was patient zero, as she would say, of the social media era. And that we rushed to judgment and that social media platforms and the Internet rushed to judgment very early. And I think more recently we've learned a big lesson on that.

[B]

To skip ahead. You arrive at NBC News in right after Ann Curry has been fired and you know, ratings are plummeting for Today. You were there when Brian Williams told some embellished stories, got into huge trouble. And I guess I want to use an event about, about trust. And I think, you know, in a way that was also a precursor of what was coming, that it was so personality focused, you know, now, now so much of news is built around personalities, but morning TV always was. How did you approach those crises kind of in that light? How did you think about that?

[C]

So I really recognized that I came into NBC News at a kind of low trust moment because the Today show was such a huge focus for the organization. It's obviously the cash cow as it is for all the networks. The morning show is what really brings in the dollars. And it was catastrophic. And that what had happened for those of you, and some of you might not have been born at the time, but anyway, the network could see that abc Good Morning America was about to overtake them in the ratings. And in order to try and stop that happening, they fired Ann Curry, who was a beloved co anchor of Matt Lauer at the time. And the way that it was done offended the audience so deeply that they actually went to number two because of what happened and because of the way they did it. And from that moment on they seemed to be in a kind of a spiral and they were chasing GMA's audience and trying to do what they were doing and it just wasn't working. Because actually if you ask the audience, which is the first thing I did when I came in, I went and had a brilliant head of marketing and we went and did really brilliant audience research which I have to do Everywhere I go. And everyone has to do it right. You've got to really understand your audience. And they told us what the problem was, and they told us what they wanted. And what they wanted, I remember distinctly was three things from the Today show. Android, NBC. Substance. Journalism. They wanted proper journalism. They didn't want them to be chasing more of the editorial agenda that you would find on Good Morning America, which was a bit more entertainment led. It was a bit more crime led. That was good for their audience, but chasing that was the wrong thing. They wanted substance, they wanted connection. So they wanted to really have an emotional relationship with the show. And that had been kind of ruptured by what had happened with Matt and Anne. And then they wanted uplift. And I think that's. I love this news market because I think people unashamedly want uplift. We want to be.

[B]

That's what we're here for today.

[C]

Yeah. Substance, connection, uplift.

[B]

And Brian Williams. I mean, I was just rereading a long Vanity Fair piece from the time that described you, I think, not even really as criticism, as beleaguered in the way.

[C]

Oh, that was one of the most common used adjectives. But other presidents of news have also had that. It's kind of a common adjective.

[B]

Yeah, exact. Exactly. Do you see that episode differently now, the Brian Williams episode, than you did then? Is there anything you've sort of reevaluated?

[C]

I mean, it was really hard because you got. It was about a year into my tenure and Nightly News had been going to number two, and we'd actually turned around all the arrows and it was actually back in growth. So we were number one in the demo. So Brian was really at the top of his game. We just renewed him for a further 10 years, I think, or something crazy, because the ratings were good and everything felt really good. Momentum. And then this happened, you know, then this story broke that started to kind of pull back the layers and reveal that Brian had been, you know, he'd been creative in his memories of some of the news stories he'd covered. And it wasn't on my watch. It was on previous. Under previous leaders of news. But it was devastating. And I think in that moment, there were discussions as to whether or not Brian could continue in any form or whether there was a way to kind of revive him. I felt. I was really concerned that it would have an impact on the brand of NBC News.

[B]

I mean, it did.

[C]

It did. But you know what? In the end, and I'm not sure it will be the same now, but in that Moment, you know, Brian took some time out. Lester Holtz became the anchor of Nightly News, which is a brilliant move because he was so, you know, really beloved and he was the right person at the right time. And actually, the brand recovered much faster than I thought it would because I think the brands, those big network brands, were more resilient than they are today. I think today it would be different and the brand itself would take a bigger hit. And of course, Brian rebuilt his reputation on the 11th hour at MSNBC and made a success once again and came back, which shows, I think America is a land of second chances. I see that. I'm not sure you could have done that in the UK market.

[B]

Well, that's a great segue to the next question, the land of no second chances. You were. You resigned in November as the CEO of BBC News, running the newsroom. This is, this is your first, first public interview since then. And it was over a series of events that centered on an edit and a documentary about Trump in January 6th on Panorama. And I know you can't talk about this stuff in detail because there, you may have heard, is a lawsuit ongoing, but do you accept the broader critique that the BBC was sort of basically anti Trump?

[C]

No, I don't. I mean, I decided to resign. That was my decision. I was running an organization of 6,000 journalists that, you know, pushes out journalism in 42 languages around the world. And there was a problem with an edit in a documentary, in a Panorama documentary which was a year old. But there was a problem with the edit. The edit wasn't authoritarian standards. But I don't accept the charge that it was a sign of institutional bias. I don't. I think that the BBC is the world's most trusted news brand because for 104 years it has not taken sides. It has really worked very, very hard to, you know, I mean, the word used BBC is to be impartial. I mean, I don't think it's a good word because I think it's kind of B2B word, but it's not a sexy word. But impartiality is in the BBC's DNA. And the teams, the journalists at the BBC really strive to make sure that they are hard on that. And that's why when I went in, I thought that the most important thing was to actually what I would call weaponize impartiality and to turn it round and to make it actually something that was really forceful. It's not other sideism, it's actually a force to be reckoned with. In a world where polarisation is pulling other media brands to the left and right, actually the BBC will be the last brand standing in however many languages AI can take it into without actually taking sides and being trusted by so many people all around the world.

[B]

I mean, I think the BBC's mostly right wing critics would say that, you know, that just because you don't see that, the fact that you're not seeing the bias sort of is evidence of it in a way. And that on issues there's deep social divisions there as here on things like Israel trans rights and I mean, do you think in retrospect you should have given more weight to pro Israel, to anti trans views, even if the staff didn't agree with them, thought they were alien, thought they were wrong.

[C]

But I think the important thing to understand about the BBC is that it is also criticized from the other side. And in fact, on Israel, Gaza, there is more criticism of the BBC being, you know, pro Israeli. And so you have to see it in the round. It doesn't mean to say that if everyone's complaining, you must be getting something right, but what it says is we live in a very, in a polarized world. And so, no, I really do believe, and I think there are certain issues where you really have to do being transparent here. Do I think that the BBC newsrooms would, in percentage terms vote the same way as the nation right now in the uk in terms of the Reform Party, which is quite, you know, quite an extreme conservative movement, very anti immigration, et cetera, they are really gathering steam. Do I think that the newsrooms are in lockstep with that rapid sudden social change? No, I don't. What that means is you've got to work even harder to maintain that impartiality and you've got to intervene in ways so like BBC Verify that we launched. BBCVerify is a brilliant, radically transparent tool which is heavily branded. It's on all of BBC's platforms and it's where you pull back the curtain on the journalism, you explain how you reach that conclusion, where that data came from, how the journalism was done. It's on social platforms, it's on the BBC's platforms and it's a way of saying we've got nothing to hide and we're working really hard and we don't, mind you seeing our workings. In fact, we want you see our workings. But for example, on immigration, I think you, you know, which is one of the hottest topics everywhere, isn't it? You have to very consciously weigh a measure, the editorial content for example, we, we made a conscious effort to run content where we've gone inside asylum hostels to expose what's going on there and expose that the taxpayers are paying millions of pounds to ferry immigrants around the country to doctor's appointments. You're revealing that stuff. I personally overruled internal editorial policy to give Nigel Farage, who is the leader of the Reform Party, primetime exposure in the last election.

[B]

I'm sure he's very grateful.

[C]

Well, I felt that he ought to be on Question Time, which is the big debate platform, and get a big Panorama interview, because even though the math and the calculation didn't say that he earned it in terms of the way things have always been done. I just said, look at the polling. We will be out of step with where the British public are. Brendan Carr talks about the media being out of step with the way the people are feeling about things. Well, BBC is paid for by all of the people. It's an obligatory license fee. And so I felt very strongly we had to reflect that on our platform. So you do sometimes have to intervene to slightly course correct and make sure that you are upholding the promise of impartiality.

[B]

We're going to take a short break here and get back to Deborah Treness after this. In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about the huge opportunities for marketers in sports. We're in this kind of incredible window for sports media, certainly for marketing, with the Winter Olympics in Milan and the super bowl in Santa Clara. These are two of the biggest stages for marketers. What are you finding interesting or not about them?

[D]

So every year, at least when it comes to the super bowl, we debate whether spending $8 million on one TV commercial is a good use of money. And actually, Tariq answered that question really well in the conversation you had with him on mixed signals, where it's never one spot, it's a larger platform. It's what you do before, during and after. When it comes to the super bowl this year and to the Winter Olympics, there are three things that I'm really seeing. First is sort of the continued rise and rise of creators. You saw Mr. Beast in the super bowl. You saw several other prominent creators in ads within the Winter Olympics coverage. You got Cleo Abrams and other creators integrated into the content from NBC. It's part of the firmament now. Creators are where it's at. The second thing I'm really struck by is, you know, the Internet doesn't have an off Season, you have the super bowl is this one day, the Winter Olympics is this one moment. But these creators on YouTube are there every day, week in, week out, and they're having super bowl like moments. The entirety of that time. The scale of the audience, the reach that they have, the ability for advertisers and brands to connect with those creators at scale and is there every day. That's amazing. And third, taste clearly matters. There's a reason why you work with Cleo Abrams. She's such a high quality content producer. And I looked at the ads across the Super Bowl. There are some that are amazing. I was very proud of the Google Ad and telling an emotional story about Gemini and AI. But in contrast, there are a number of ads, some made with generative AI, which I don't think were ready for prime time. That's my opinion. But ultimately taste is important for marketing. We can't ignore that.

[B]

And where can people go for more?

[D]

If you head over to thinkwithgoogle.com there's actually a bunch of content about data and trends to do with creators and sports. It's all there on thinkwithgoogle.com.

[B]

In talking to your admirers and your critics in preparation for this in London, are there critics? There are a couple. I mean, that is a tough job. Jesus. You're one of two things. That your resignation in Tim Davies was a reasonable response to a failure to take on board this Prescott memo and other internal questions and serious questions about bias, or that this was really a right wing political coup orchestrated by one board member by outsiders that didn't have that much to do with the details of this edit and was really, you know, whatever happened with the edit, this was really fundamentally about advancing a right wing political agenda in Britain, which. Which wasn't.

[C]

I decided that I was not going to come here and make newslines about this particular story. Partly because I'm just being transparent.

[B]

This is the kind of transparency we get here.

[C]

Yeah. Partly because there is litigation and court action and all of this is actually, you know, it relates to it. So I think I would be doing a disservice to myself and to my organization and to any pending legal action if I were to make news here. Perhaps I'll come back next year.

[B]

I'm trying. Well, maybe on a sort of broader, less directly newsy question. Do you think the BBC's board is up to the job?

[C]

I think this is going to be a diplomatic answer. Just carrying on. Much as I think that there are some really, really brilliant people on the BBC board who really care about the organization, who really understand where it needs to go, whether that's from a commercial point of view. I mean I was a board member and I joined the BBC as a board member. Brought in I think because I see see organizations through an uncompromisingly consumer led and commercial lens. And I think Tim Davies, the Director general built his executive team from people who'd come from the commercial world. And so news was one of the last points where the places where he put me in to do that. But it was also to really plan for the charter. The BBC is renegotiating its charter now with the government and I really wanted to drive quite radical change in the relationship with the.

[B]

So you're not going to directly answer

[C]

that question, but what I'm saying is there are people who are, I have learned so much from on the BBC board, including the previous chair who's no longer there.

[B]

Maybe a different way to ask that question, but sort of in brief is, is the structure of governance of the BBC under this board, is that workable or does it need change?

[C]

I think I wouldn't be the first person to say that having political appointees on the, on the board of the BBC is something that I think needs to be looked at because of course I, I have no problem with political appointees as long as you get a diversity of opinions and views. But I think there can be an issue if too many of the political appointees are appointed by one particular government because terms come up and the Secretary of State said the same thing. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sports has said that, you know, and maybe because I haven't been there for the last couple of months, maybe they are looking at that as part of the next charter. I'm not sure. But it's not controversial to say that.

[B]

And then I guess the final question which is really relevant to that here, you know, the US Congress chart just defunded PBS and NPR and you know, the U.S. i think we are ahead of Britain in terms of the divisiveness of our political culture and the just fragmentation of the media. But these are global trends. I mean do you think that public media institutions like the BBC can, you know, really can survive that world? Or do you think what's happened here is coming to Britain?

[C]

Look, I think it's about. So first of all, I think the BBC is slightly different because it is still really valued by the majority of the people in the uk. It is, it gets a lot of, you know, it's attacked a lot by parts of the media that don't love it, but the people of Britain, it really is. It's so much more than news. It's the Olympics, it's traitors, it's Strictly Come Dancing, it's the problems. It's so much part of. It's knitted in to UK society and life. However, as people are subscribing, it's an obligatory license fee. Everybody has to pay it. And that is coming under strain. More and more people are deciding not to, even though it can be a criminal offence to be caught not paying a license fee, if you are still consuming the BBC and most people are, because BBC is serving up really good stuff. I think what protects public organizations from this kind of constant attack, reduction and questions as to whether they are relevant or not is to modernize. And that's what I went to the BBC to do, to bring in streaming to build. And we grew trust. I mean, in a time of declining trust, we actually intervened and grew trust. But we also went with Vertical Video. We overtook Apple as the number one news app in the UK market. We've put a paywall in the us. You've got to keep modernizing. You've got to stay up. And I think Hamish sitting this chair just now, I was so glad to follow Hamish because I think these trends, what we're seeing, the moving away of trust from institutions to individuals, are very, very real. And I've just spent the last few weeks with this sort of period. I've got to assess the media environment, understand what's really happening. It's just so brilliant to have the time. I think that if big network brands and public institutions don't take heed of this movement and don't start to embody some of those behaviors and the authenticity and you've got to stop managing the news you're making and actually let your talent and your journalists have a relationship with your audiences. That's terrifying for a lot of big organizations. But as we're seeing this flight to substack and YouTube, if you don't actually start to understand that's where consumers are going, because that's the relationship they want, it's not lost. It's not either. Or. I mean, Hamish's book is called how to Save the Media, but I don't believe that it's all about just everyone's got to go to Substack. Even though it is a brilliant platform and it's showing the way, I think the BBC or NBC or any organization needs to understand where consumers are and investors the time just to think about it and work out how they can also sort of mirror some of those new social behaviors because they're their needs and they won't go away.

[B]

All right, well, thank you so much, Deborah.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Thanks for taking the time.

[C]

Thank you. Thank you everybody.

[B]

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[A]

So Ben, in preparation for this, as we were going over questions, I went back and looked at some of the controversy around the editing here. This is something that I think we wrote about and maybe even talked about on the show. So for people who don't remember, there was essentially just kind of a edit in the documentary which made Trump seem slightly more like he was egging on protesters to go and kind of attack the Capitol. But it seemed like a pretty bad but not like the world's worst mistake that one could make in journalism. People have survived a lot worse than this. But what did you take away from her response to this lawsuit and her departure from the BBC? She hasn't spoken on it.

[B]

She hasn't spoken. She did go a little further than she has gone basically to defend the intent of the BBC and to say, look, this was an editing mistake. Her allies have been quoted widely saying that she had wanted to clean it up faster and that there was kind of political paralysis of the BBC board. And I think people who support here are pretty upset about that. But yeah, I think there's this basically kind of big underlying question in Britain of is the BBC basically biased and left wing lamestream media or is this a big institution with thousands of journalists that makes the occasional error that is getting seized on by kind of enemies of the establishment, more broadly, enemies of kind of agreed upon truth in the interest of the political right. And she obviously believes the former.

[A]

Since we're recording this the day after and this interview is already out in the wild, it's kind of been fun to read some of the responses already to what people thought were newsworthy. And actually the moment that really made my ears perk up that I think also seemed to resonate in The UK was her concession or acknowledgement that most people in the BBC newsroom would obviously not be supporters of the reform movement party within the newsroom, which is not totally surprising and not that different from most mainstream newsrooms. But what did you think about that moment? Did that surprise you? Did that stick out? And did you hear from anyone who, after you got off stage, who was watching in the uk?

[B]

I haven't heard from Nigel Farage, but you know, Nigel, call me. I thought it was an unusually kind of forthright moment. I haven't heard an American newsroom leader say, hey, look, obviously nobody in our newsroom voted for Donald Trump or very few people. And so we have to be extra careful to be fair. Like, that's what she said. And, you know, again, I'm not enough in the weeds of their coverage of reform to know if reform supporters always feel that they were fair. But it's the rising movement in the uk, it's the sort of populist, right, you know, English nationalist party, the Brexit Party, in a way, led by Nigel Farage. And I guess there had been some question of whether he should be included in Question Time, their interview show with big political leaders, when he's not kind of technically one of the leaders of the two major parliamentary parties. And she decided to include him because he's up in the polls, even if her journalists or kind of people at the BBC weren't gonna support him. I'm not sure. I don't think you ever wind up getting any credits with anybody for honesty. Like, I'm not sure you really do if you're in a position like hers. Yeah, but I did appreciate that she just said, obviously there's not a lot of reform supporters at the BBC, so we have to be extra careful about that blind spot. Like, I think that's a honest thing to say. And most American newsroom leaders kind of dance around that kind of question rather than just saying it out loud. And then this is all in the context, of course, of this attack on the BBC that should be like, very familiar to Americans, but also very different because pbs, NPR are nice alternatives if you want a certain kind of thoughtful, slower paced journalism. But the BBC is the central institution of British journalism. So central that many British national papers kind of don't cover day to day breaking news. They just assume the BBC will cover the moment to moment. If there's a big fire in Glasgow, they're not going to go send a reporter to that. Like, you just take the BBC coverage. And so in a way, the British media space is this a lot of it is all this commentary that's arranged around the BBC journalism at the core, it's just a very powerful central institution. But it's the same impulse of like, in such a polarized society, can you really have media institutions that are in some sense public, that are publicly funded, publicly supported? I mean, you know, basically Congress this year turned off funding for NPR and PBS and basically decided, no, there's not gonna be some publicly funded, agreed upon truth. I'm curious. Deborah made a very strong case the BBC is such a central institution that it will survive this era. I mean, did you buy it? What do you think the lessons of the US are for her?

[A]

Yeah, I think that the BBC's centrality and its strength and its importance to a large number of people in the UK has insulated it to a certain degree from the kind of things that could happen here. But of course, the defunding of public media, which has been a goal for the right for 50 or 60 years and was something that people thought would never happen, it flipped pretty much within a few months. Essentially. When I started reporting on the efforts to defund NPR immediately after the election, I talked to a lot of people who thought that it was going to be the same playbook over again, that basically Trump and Republicans were going to basically not include NPR in the budget, that NPR's government affairs team would basically be able to lobby a few rural members of Congress and they would, you know, they would essentially support NPR and that funding would be included and things would, would proceed as usual. And that had been what had happened for almost 50 or 60 years. And then one year it just didn't because there were enough Republicans in Congress who just didn't care. There were enough media alternatives in the kind of new media space to fill the void. And basically enough people on the right didn't read or consume either of those things. And so their constituents didn't necessarily miss them or complain to them about. And so I don't think that's gonna happen to the BBC for all the reasons that Deborah laid out. It's just a bigger force there. It's more central. It's a part of the British identity for a lot of folks and it's widely consumed. She mentioned it's the number one news app in the UK which is, which is quite impressive. But I don't think it should be underrated that the Globe part of the global populist right wing movement. One of the core tenets of it is opposition to the news media. And that is. And defunding that where possible is as core to that movement as, you know, kind of anti immigration and other of that nature. So I don't think that they should underestimate. That's gonna be an issue for a long time going forward. The last closing thought I wanted to say is kind of, Ben, do you think that she should have resigned? I mean, do you think that this is a big enough screw up that she should have resigned?

[B]

You have to just have some grace for people screwing up. And I think the question isn't, was Panorama, this British program, trying to frame Donald Trump for January 6th? Like the January 6th question has been like pretty widely investigated and Trump's role pretty widely known. Panorama was not going to Panorama show, I assume, I don't know if any of our listeners watched this talk documentary, like no one had ever heard of this documentary, at least in the United States until it became a scandal in the British press, was obviously not going to move the needle on how the world thought about January 6th. I think the deeper question, and it's a really hard question, is if you have a public that kind of deeply disagrees with the point of view of most of the people in this big newsroom. Like, I think, I mean, my guess is that most people in that newsroom at some level hold Trump accountable for January 6, at some level think the pardons were inappropriate of violent January 6th rioters. You know, are you allowed to express threat through the journalism? I think there's this Prescott memo internally that leaked that didn't say this was an isolated screw up, said this was a symptom of pervasive anti Trump bias, that the newsroom was kind of the left of society on questions of gender and on stuff around Israel. And I think in a really divided society, it's harder just to like imagine that there's this public institution that, that holds the center. But I don't know, Max, do you think she should have. Will you resign next time you have a correction?

[A]

No, I don't think so. But I think that you're right that the memo is the thing that kind of blew it up. The actual mistake wasn't that bad. But the idea that people internally thought that there was this institutional bias, obviously was the thing that forced her to go. But I don't think that the error

[B]

itself was particularly egregious, like Donald Trump's gonna find out in court.

[A]

Yeah. Well, that is it for us today. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of mixed signals from us here at semaphore. Media. Our show is produced by Manny Fadal, with special thanks to Josh Billenson, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pisino, Daniel Haft, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Steve Bone. Our public editor is Brendan Carr, who you can watch grill and steamroll Ben on our YouTube channel.

[B]

He's sort of everybody's public editor, I suppose, although he did seem particularly pleased with CBS News. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to receive his praise. And if you enjoy the podcast, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on YouTube.

[A]

And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's Media newsletter, which is still out every Sunday night.