The BBC doesn’t always say what we want to hear. Sometimes it frustrates us, sometimes it seems to miss the point, and sometimes it leaves us shouting at the television like we’re auditioning for Question Time. But perhaps that’s exactly the point. If the BBC manages to annoy people from the left, the right, and especially the far right, then it’s probably doing something right.

In an age of social media hysteria and tribal politics, it’s rare to find an organisation that still tries to stand somewhere in the middle, clinging to balance while everyone else is setting fire to their own echo chambers. The BBC, for all its faults, still tries. And in doing so, it upsets almost everyone. Which, if you think about it, might be the most British thing it could possibly do.

When people on both extremes of the political spectrum accuse the BBC of bias, it usually says more about them than it does about the BBC. After all, a broadcaster that makes everyone happy isn’t a journalistic institution; it’s a pantomime.

The Dangers of Losing Independence

The real danger lies in allowing the BBC to be dictated to by powerful private interests. If organisations like the Murdochs or the Rothermere family ever get their hands properly on the BBC’s steering wheel, we might as well hand microphones to hedge funds and call it news.

Once the media becomes a tool for the powerful, the stories we hear will no longer challenge authority; they’ll comfort it. And history tells us that when journalists stop asking difficult questions, bad things happen. Often quite quickly.

A Warning from Across the Atlantic

When people like Donald Trump attack the BBC, calling it fake news, they’re not trying to make journalism better; they’re trying to make it obedient. And when people in Britain join in, gleefully bashing the BBC as though they’re defending free speech, what they’re actually doing is helping to bury it.

If we allow the BBC to be dismantled or neutered, truth itself becomes negotiable, something to be traded, packaged and sold to the highest bidder. It’s a short path from there to a world where the news looks less like reporting and more like an advert for the people running it.

Flawed but Essential

Of course, the BBC isn’t perfect. It sometimes gets things wrong, it sometimes feels out of touch, and it occasionally resembles an old mate who smoked too much waccy baccy when we were younger, well-meaning but slightly baffling. Yet it remains one of the few institutions that still tries to serve the public rather than sell to it.

So next time you find yourself yelling at the Six O’Clock News, take comfort in this: the fact that the BBC irritates Jacob Rees-Mogg, Owen Jones and probably your next door neighbour all in the same week means it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Because a world without the BBC wouldn’t just be quieter. It would be darker, lonelier and far more dangerous, the kind of place where you’d start missing the sound of the newsreader saying, “And finally, a man in Kent has built Britain’s longest model railway in his loft.”