Ever since Graham Linehan’s bail restrictions were relaxed and the Father Ted creator was allowed back on X, he’s been firing off a blizzard of posts with the urgency of a man who senses that, for the first time in years, he is finally being taken seriously.
One post particularly caught my eye. It stated: ‘BBC Director General Tim Davie should resign for misleading the UK public on this issue.’
Linehan has occasionally exhibited a reckless tendency to stray into infuriated hyperbole on social media, a trait that has drawn criticism in the past and legal jeopardy in the present. But the suggestion made in this post is worthy of serious consideration.
Although I work at the BBC, I’m way too far down the food chain to have had any direct dealings with Tim Davie. What I do know is that since he became the seventeenth Director-General of the corporation in September 2020, he has overseen some of the most egregious misreporting in the history of the corporation.
He would strongly dispute this assertion and point to the work he has led to ensure BBC News is even-handed in all its coverage. Just over a year into his new role, in October 2021, a grinning Davie unveiled his ‘significant’ ten-point impartiality plan. It included this assertion: ‘In the age of fake news, echo chambers of opinion and noisy partisan media outlets, our news serves audiences with the facts, the analysis and the insight they deserve.’ When it comes to the trans issue, however, this claim has been patently false.
Only a month later, Davie was placating the vocal trans lobby within the corporation, assuring these unbending activists that he thought it would be ‘a serious issue if the BBC [was] perceived as transphobic’. This declaration came during a meeting with the BBC Pride group after Davie had sensibly pulled the Corporation out of a so-called workplace equality scheme run by the deeply compromised LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall. Already Davie appeared to be buckling to those who believe that truth-telling about biology is somehow hateful.
To be fair to him, the BBC had been captured by trans ideology before he took up the reins. I would recommend listening to the testimony of Jo-Anne, a respected senior BBC staffer who left the corporation earlier this year after 36 years of service. She told the first ‘SEEN in Journalism’ podcast, published earlier this month, that she started ‘getting anxious’ about BBC coverage at the end of 2019, during the time of the Maya Forstater employment tribunal. (Forstater, who lost out on a job after tweeting gender-critical views, eventually won a £100,000 discrimination payout after a torturous legal fight.)
Jo-Anne said she tried to encourage coverage of the Forstater case but was met with editorial resistance of a kind she had not encountered before.
She said: ‘What struck me was the fear and dogmatic attitude of colleagues and management when you brought up this story. I had never encountered anything like it. I’d had dealings with lots of editorial policy issues before but had never come across a subject where people just didn’t want to go there.’
At one point, Jo-Anne said she suggested the BBC fact-check whether ‘sex is real’. The response she received is revealing.
‘I was told by senior people to me that the BBC couldn’t possibly go there, it would have to go through far too many committees, that trans women were women… there’s no appetite for it and we don’t want to do it.’
In the intervening years, little has changed under Davie’s tenure as DG. The BBC has continued to bow to the trans militants, depicting men as women, even when it is as plain as day that the men in question are deliberately donning the trans cloak of protection with cynical or menacing motivations.
Only last month BBC News was referring to an alleged neo-Nazi, with a moustache a Spaghetti Western bandito would be proud of, as ‘she’. Anybody who has seen a picture of Marla-Svenja Liebich knows the truth but the BBC, in its use of female pronouns throughout its online article, presents a bald lie. As J.K. Rowling noted, the BBC’s ‘absolutist belief in gender identity ideology means any man – rapist, voyeur, terrorist, murderer or paedophile – must be described as a woman the moment he says he’s one.’
Rowling isn’t exaggerating. Only a week after the Liebich case, the BBC reported on a shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, in which two children were killed and more than a dozen people injured. Again, the disturbed biologically-male murderer was referred to – by BBC Verify no less – using female pronouns.
It seems every month a fresh example of the gaslighting of BBC audiences appears. In July, the BBC News website ran with the headline, ‘Wife killed husband with samurai sword, court told.’ Under the headline is a picture of a careworn middle-aged man with an incongruous mop of platinum blonde hair. It’s only when you reach the fifth paragraph that you realise that this individual, ‘who is transgender’ is the ‘wife’ in question. A jury found Joanna Rowland-Stuart, formerly known as John Stuart, guilty of a brutal, extremely violent crime the likes of which are almost always committed by biological men.
This kind of misleading reporting has happened time and again on Davie’s watch. Even the disturbing findings of the Cass Review into gender identity services for under-18s, and the Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, have failed to move the editorial needle significantly.
I have written at length on previous occasions about the BBC’s one-sided Covid coverage. If anything, the approach to the trans issue has been even more shocking. I hesitate to say it, but I believe this could be the worst scandal ever to hit the BBC, and that – I realise – is saying something.
Why? Because unlike the horrors of the Jimmy Savile revelations or, more recently, Huw Edwards’s appalling conduct, the BBC has, in effect, made all its journalists complicit in the mainstreaming of a dangerous social media contagion that has caused real-world harms.
The BBC has kneeled at the altar of trans activism, putting virtue-signalling progressivism ahead of hard-headed realism and impartiality. In doing so, it has amplified the calumny that anyone who believes women’s sex-based rights matter, and that being a woman is more than a costume or a set of behaviours, is a bigot who must be condemned, cancelled and ostracised. More damningly, it has played a part in convincing an entire generation of children who are experiencing entirely normal growing pains, or discovering their true sexuality, that they may have been ‘born in the wrong body’.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when this madness set in at the BBC but it has continued unabated under Tim Davie with no sign of change on the horizon. Earlier this week, he appeared before parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee. He told them: ‘No one’s irreplaceable, we’re all dispensable. That’s an absolute, unequivocal position being given to the whole BBC.’
This presumably applies to Davie himself. He has had half a decade to recalibrate the BBC’s skewed positioning on an Orwellian ideology that has damaged the health of children, undermined women’s rights, and made it easier for a minority of sinister and dangerous men to indulge their perversions and criminality. He has failed to do this. If he really cares about the BBC’s reputation he should follow Linehan’s advice and go.
Comments