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Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Oscar Edwinson and I'm joined by James Heel and Sonia Soda, freelance broadcaster and journalist.

Now, the BBC, once again, making the headlines, rather than writing the headlines,

James Heel, what happened yesterday? So this was the late resignation on Sunday evening of Tim Davy,

the BBC Director General, and Deborah Turnerness, who's the CEO of News. This followed the leak memo, which the Telegraph picked up from Michael Prescott, talking about breaches of the corporation's guidelines about various different stories. But the one, of course,

which attracted most attention was about the editing of a panorama episode, which had Donald

Trump's speech from January 2021 spliced together. So the BBC Director General has resigned. As I

wrote in the lunchtime email today, I think one of a succession of various resignations from the BBC. So following Greg Endwistle in 2012, Tony Hall, 2020, about different problems with the programming. It's a bit like the home office. And I was reminded of Gordon Brown's old line about chancellors. Either you resign in disgrace or you get out in time. And so it's always a bit of a cursed thing. But really, I mean, this is a series of systemic issues with the BBC, more stories recently. But the most recent development is that the BBC chair, Samir Shah, has now published a letter to the Culture, media and Sport Committee, apologising for the area of judgment about the Trump interview. Unsure if Trump has now threatened legal action, which he has now chosen to do so. And also, So he's insisting that it's simply not true that the organisation has done nothing to tackle problems. And so basically trying to defend the corporation's reputation at a time when it's coming under siege about the different elements in which it's sort of let down the standards. Now, Sonia, there's a very probing headline on your piece in The Times from this morning, which is, what's the point of the BBC if it can't be impartial? Can you shed a little bit more light on that one?

Sure, of course, but I'm going to start off with that common health warning from journalists, which is that we don't write the headlines, but it's a fair headline on the piece because one of the things that I argue in the piece,

now I'm a big supporter of the BBC, I'm a big supporter of public service broadcasting.

I think in an increasingly polarised online world, an impartial BBC news has got a more important role to play than ever.

But I also say in the piece there are intellectually

respectable arguments against public service broadcasting. And one of them is that it's actually

very difficult to have a properly impartial public service broadcaster doing news. I think it is

possible. The problem is that when problems are exposed with that impartiality, as I think

they have been with the BBC in recent years, for the BBC just to sort of dismiss it and say,

no, no, nothing to see here, just a series of kind of individual errors we've corrected.

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