The BBC: The story of the world's leading broadcaster

Published in the new issue of the Jerusalem Report, dated 12 August 2024

           The British Broadcasting Corporation marked its 100th anniversary in November 2022.  To mark the occasion David Hendy, Professor Emeritus of Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex, undertook the mammoth task of producing a history of the organization from its origins right up to its 100th year.

            Something of the sort, but on a much more ambitious scale, had already been attempted.  In 1961 Professor Asa Briggs published the first of his five-volume official history of broadcasting in the UK, and spent the next 35 years on the task.  His fifth volume, bringing the story to 1974, appeared in 1995 and was the last. 

Briggs’s purpose was to recount the story of broadcasting as a whole in the UK.  For its first 30 years or so that meant the story of the BBC.  Unlike America, where competitive commercial radio stations quickly sprang up and multiplied, Britain established just the BBC to develop radio broadcasting for the nation, and it retained its monopoly for both radio and television until the mid-1950s.  Since then the growth of competitive broadcasting organizations and the increasing variety of transmission systems has made any generalized history too complex to contemplate.  No-one has had the temerity to resume the Briggs official history.

Hendy, of course, confines his account to the BBC’s story, and he chooses to do so in a way that emphasizes the human, rather than the organizational or political aspects – though these are certainly not neglected when germane.  He subtitles his work “A People’s History”.

Say “BBC” in Israel, and most informed people will immediately call to mind the charges of anti-Isael bias that have featured in the media over the past half-century or more.  Indeed in April 2004 the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, of antisemitism and "total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups" over a report on a 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber.

These anti-Israel  charges, often associated with particular BBC reports or reporters, have persisted for 50 years or more. 

          In the Six Day War in 1967 the BBC refused for a time to broadcast the reports by Michael Elkins of immediate and massive Israeli victories, because the news editors simply did not believe them.  Over the following years the perceived anti-Israel bias by the BBC gave rise to bodies like BBC Watch, devoted to monitoring BBC programmes (that organization later became Camera-UK), and to individuals like UK-born lawyer Trevor Asserson.

For a seven-week period in 2001, Asserson’s team recorded the bulk of the BBC’s Middle East news output on TV and radio, and for comparison they simultaneously recorded reports from a variety of other sources.  Their conclusion: the BBC was in frequent breach of its obligations under its charter and broadcasting license to be unbiased and impartial.

Asserson’s reports, matched by vociferous Palestinian claims of pro-Israel bias in the BBC, finally led the corporation to commission an investigation and report from one of its senior journalists, Malcolm Balen.

Balen examined hundreds of hours of broadcast material, both TV and radio, analyzing the content in minute detail.  This exhaustive study resulted in a 20,000-word report.  At the end of 2004 it was given highly restricted circulation within the top echelons of the BBC, but thereafter it was treated as Top Secret and locked away.   And locked away it has remained to this day, despite numerous and high-powered attempts to get it released to the public.

Turn to the extensive index in Hendy’s “The BBC”, and you will search in vain for Israel, BBC Watch, bias, Asserson, Balen or Gaza.  No doubt the author would assert, and no doubt with reason, that in a 600-page compass he could not cover every single aspect of the BBC’s story.  But this matter of BBC bias has been central to the Corporation’s existence for so long, and confidence in the BBC so shaken, that in June 2020 a new BBC Director General, Tim Davie, came to the post publicly committed to restoring public trust in the BBC.  “Impartiality,” he told BBC staff, “is sacrosanct.”  On joining the corporation, he said, staff were required to leave their personal political views “at the door.”  He was prepared to dismiss anyone who breached the guidelines.  The BBC had to be “free from political bias”.

Hendy makes no mention of this, and for it to be by-passed in a modern history of the BBC seems a crucial omission.  Perhaps Hendy intends to pre-empt this criticism with his very first sentence: “Is a history of the BBC even possible?”  But what he does provide is an extremely readable account of this unique broadcasting organization whose reach gradually extended across the whole globe.

He starts by painting a detailed word portrait of the three men who, in November 1922, founded the British Broadcasting Company, as it was first named.  It turned into a Corporation in 1926.  One was the formidable and renowned later Director General, John Reith – the man who stamped his own Christian morality and strict personal principles on the organization he headed with distinction until his resignation – inexplicable to many – in 1938.

          Hendy explains how the new-born BBC was defined from its start by the high moral tone set by Reith, who summarized the nascent BBC's purpose as to “inform, educate and entertain”. The order of priority was deliberate. To Reith’s way of thinking, entertainment was far from broadcasting’s main purpose. Informing and educating the public was of far greater importance. His principles live on to this day in the BBC’s mission statement, which runs: "to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.”

         From its earliest days Reith successfully established and maintained the independence of the BBC from political interference. A notable battle of wills with the government occurred during the General Strike of 1926, when Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill made several bids to control the BBC and use it to disseminate pro-government propaganda. Reith resisted, and helped establish the principle of the BBC’s independence. By 1939, when the UK went to war with Germany, the BBC’s reputation for accuracy, objectivity and impartiality was firmly established.

          Throughout World War II the BBC broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe in a multiplicity of languages, and people all over the continent literally risked their lives to hear the truth from London. In addition, the BBC’s shortwave transmissions covered the world. At its peak it was broadcasting across the globe in some 80 languages.

          Hendy paints a vivid picture of how the BBC coped with the exigencies of war, both domestically and by way of its overseas transmissions.  Bruce Belfrage was one of the small news-reading team stationed in the basement of Broadcasting House.  One evening, during the Blitz on London, he was broadcasting a news bulletin when a bomb crashed through a window on the seventh floor..  Listeners heard a distant thump.  Belfrage paused for a brief second and then went on calmly to finish the bulletin. 

Then there are the coded messages that were slipped into wartime foreign-language services intended for resistance groups in occupied Europe. Listeners to the French service of the BBC soon became accustomed to a succession of odd messages like “Brother Paul hugs sister Mary” being broadcast after the news night after night – each a coded instruction to a resistance group.

Or an officer from one of the armies-in-exile would turn up at the BBC just before the news, carrying a record to be played on that night’s bulletin.  The system was not infallible. Once, the producer simply forgot to play the record. On another occasion, a programme assistant decided the track was too scratchy and chose another. Thus, as one BBC employee recalled, “the wrong bridge would get blown up in Poland.”

          The latter years in the BBC’s story contain a great deal to interest the reader, but do not have the sweep and excitement of the war years.  There have been scandals aplenty.  One concerned the late revelation that the BBC’s top entertainment star for many years, Jimmy Savile, had been a rampant paedophile all his working life.   Another was that the BBC journalist, Martin Bashir, who obtained an exclusive TV interview with the late Princess Diana, had forged a series of documents in an underhand operation to persuade her to grant it. A third was when a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, accused Tony Blair, the prime minister, on air of deliberately and consciously misleading the nation into backing war with Iraq.

Hendy claims that the BBC is “on our side”; that it is always “for the people”. This claim is decisively disproved when it comes to the long period during which Brexit dominated the political arena. Throughout the national debate the BBC was obviously biased against Leave and firmly aligned to Remain. Yet, as the 2016 referendum demonstrated, “the people” were on the other side.  

The BBC is still grappling with its failure to live up fully to its aspiration of achieving genuine impartiality in issues of major importance – a failure which Hendy prefers to sidestep*. Nevertheless, The BBC – A People’s History is a fascinating, highly readable, and extremely informative record of the first century of what is probably the world’s leading broadcast organization.

*In contrast to his "Life on Air - A history of Radio Four", published in 2007, in which he deals extensively with the issues of bias and impartiality.