The BBC Cannot Be Saved Until It Knows What It Is For
The real danger facing the BBC is not the licence fee, Ofcom, political pressure or the latest media storm. The real danger is the slow erosion of meaning inside its own walls. Like the country it serves, the BBC has become divided, defensive and uncertain of what it stands for. The arguments erupting over language, values and tone are not the cause of its crisis. They are symptoms of something deeper I believe: an organisation that has lost its organising purpose.
Last week exposed that. A leaked internal memo pointing to editorial failings, including a flawed Panorama edit of President Trump’s speech, became a flashpoint. The BBC Board hesitated, the narrative slipped away, and within days both the Director General and the Head of News were gone. Senior figures spoke of coups. Critics from the left and right piled in. What should have been a contained governance issue became an institutional rupture.
Over the past 100 years the BBC has weathered wars, governments and cultural revolutions. However, the one thing that could ultimately bring this venerable institution down is confusion about its purpose. That’s the real danger now and it could be a very real wrecking ball.
Crisis
Let’s put last week’s meltdown into context. It did not happen because of one memo or one edit. It happened I think because the BBC no longer has a unifying idea strong enough to hold it together. Without shared purpose, the organisation reacts to pressure like a body without a spine, collapsing inward and pulled apart by competing instincts.
The warning signs have been visible all year. When more internal complaints were made about Martine Croxall’s off the cuff reaction to the phrase “pregnant people” than from viewers, it revealed a staff base divided not simply by opinion but by a lack of common mission. A confident institution would have absorbed the moment. A divided one inflated it.
Everything that happened this week, from the hesitation to the resignations and the internal tensions, points to the same truth. The BBC is operating without a mission suited to the modern age. When purpose disappears, leadership can no longer lead and staff can no longer align.
Cause
The root cause is pretty straightforward. It’s clear the BBC no longer really knows what it is for. The old Reithian slogan of Inform, Educate and Entertain may have served its time, but it now feels too small for the complexity of the modern digital world. When an institution loses its sense of self, its people inevitably lose theirs.
This is not a problem created by a single individual at the top. In fact, the BBC’s new Chair, Dr Samir Shah, has openly asked the same fundamental question in his email to staff when he first started: “What is the point and purpose of the BBC in this new media environment?” That question shows awareness, not indifference.
The difficulty is that much of the internal culture, from the Director General downwards, has been shaped by people who built their careers inside commercial broadcasters or global consumer companies such as Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo. Most are, of course, highly skilled and committed so the issue is not who they are, but the mindset they bring with them. Their desire to prove they deliver value will often mean their instincts naturally revolve around ratings, competitiveness and tactical wins rather than long term public value.
The danger is, in an environment shaped by those instincts, the BBC begins to behave like a polished alternative to ITV rather than a national cultural institution. Success becomes defined by audience graphs instead of public purpose. Meetings shift towards share and reach rather than leadership and invention. Strategies become focused on keeping up rather than standing apart.
At the same time, despite Shah’s declaration that the Beeb needs to find its new purpose, the Board has been criticised for slow decision making and hesitant governance. Last week exposed the consequences. When leadership pauses, the rest of the organisation fills the vacuum with anxiety and division. Departments then harden into tribes. Culture becomes brittle and the workforce becomes defensive.
Over time this misalignment has pushed the BBC into every conceivable digital niche in search of relevance. Weather apps, recipe portals, lifestyle content and large scale podcast distribution have stretched it so widely that its identity has blurred. The organisation is everywhere and nowhere at once. A public broadcaster created to enrich national culture now competes in areas where it adds little unique benefit.
In the past the BBC kept the UK broadcasting landscape healthy by raising standards and setting creative markers. Today it is trying to compete with global giants. Yet Netflix will never be a civic institution just as Amazon will never commission shows like Songs of Praise. YouTube will never truly reflect the national conversation. It will simply host polarised views delivered by partisan creators. Only the BBC can do all these things. When it loses sight of this, the rest of the organisation drifts into confusion.
Consequence
The effects of this purpose vacuum are now visible across the institution. Teams operate like islands. Editorial disputes turn into ideological battles. Every disagreement feels existential because nobody is sure what the organisation is aiming for.
When mission is unclear, leadership loses authority. Nobody can define what good judgement looks like. Creators and managers become defensive. The institution becomes timid instead of confident and aspirational. This is basic organisational management behaviour but I guess it is easy to lose sight of when you are in it. I know when I worked there I did.
Despite this, the BBC still produces world class work in places. The Natural History Unit, The Traitors and Strictly show what happens when purpose and ambition align. This is not surprising. The organisation is filled with talented and committed creative people who want to serve the public. The problem is not the workforce. The problem is the timid environment they operate in. Much of the wider output now feels engineered to avoid criticism rather than designed to inspire. Creativity becomes cautious when purpose disappears.
Distorted markets
Worse than that, the BBC is in danger of losing its soul. Its purpose is not to overpower competitors. Its purpose is to guide the market towards areas that matter and to create space for new voices. A public broadcaster is not meant to become the only content provider people rely on. Commercial giants want dominance. The BBC should never want that.
Local news demonstrates the point. Local reporting is a genuine social purpose. Yet the BBC’s digital expansion has long been criticised by regional publishers for crowding out independent newsrooms. Imagine if the BBC used its scale to strengthen local journalism rather than replicate it. Shared investigations. Pooled resources. Co produced reporting that enriches civic life. That would be public service. Dominating the space is not.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. Why does the BBC need an enormous recipe library. Teaching people to cook well and live healthily is valuable. Publishing hundreds of lifestyle recipes already offered by commercial publishers is not. It adds little public value and suppresses others who rely on that traffic.
The weather app raises the same questions. A wide range of free and established weather services already exist. Running another one with public money is duplication rather than public service. It distracts from the areas where only the BBC can make a national impact.
Podcasting exposes the issue most clearly. BBC Sounds is an excellent platform. Yet the BBC also pushes its in house, publicly funded podcasts onto Apple and Spotify. The result is dominance of the charts. Independent creators, including working class producers and small companies, are pushed down not because their work is inferior but because they are competing against a taxpayer funded giant. This is not healthy competition. It is structural distortion.
If the BBC wants to appear on open platforms, the solution is obvious. Independently produced, commissioned content should appear there. In house content should remain on BBC Sounds.
These examples do not create the problem. They reveal it. They show how the BBC has drifted into becoming something it was never meant to be. The organisation is not a general purpose content factory, but it is in danger of becoming one. When an institution tries to operate in every space, its identity blurs. The BBC’s greatest achievements have never come from covering everything. They have come from choosing wisely where to intervene and then elevating those areas for the entire industry.
The history of the BBC proves this. Natural history television barely existed before the BBC invested in it. The BBC Micro brought coding into classrooms when computing was still a fringe interest. These were not commercial plays. They were public interventions. They reflected a willingness to lead.
Modern BBC staff are just as capable of this. The organisation contains some of the most creative and publicly minded professionals in the country. Many want to make work that contributes to society in ways only the BBC can. The malaise they face is the predictable consequence of unclear direction. It is difficult for staff to unite behind a mission that is no longer expressed with clarity or ambition.
The BBC does not lack creativity. It lacks leadership that knows how to focus it. It needs a purpose strong enough to unify its people and leadership confident enough to articulate it.
Above all, the BBC must stop trying to keep up and start trying to lead. This is the test of the next Director General. Not managing decline. Not defending the licence fee. Not issuing apologies after the next crisis. The test is whether they can restore the BBC’s creative purpose and with it the country’s faith in the institution.
If they can do that, the BBC might not simply survive. It might matter again.