Five senior BBC executives, including the chairman of the corporation, answered questions from MPs for more than three hours.
This comes after allegations that the media is biased in its coverage of some topics, including Donald Trump, Gaza and transgender people, and has already led to the resignation of the director-general Tim Davey. The scandal began with leaked information that the BBC management did not pay attention to a report by a former editorial advisor who had signaled “serious and systemic problems“ in its coverage of events.
It follows the revelation that a speech by US President Donald Trump was edited in a way that misled viewers. Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for billions of dollars, despite the corporation's apology. The BBC chairman Samir Shah, two board members - Robbie Gibb and Caroline Thomson, as well as the authors of the critical report Michael Prescott and Caroline Daniel were questioned by the parliamentary committee on culture, media and sport. However, the allegations of "institutional bias" were disputed by Caroline Daniel, although she and Michael Prescott are the authors of the critical report. Daniel told MPs that in her opinion the BBC "has taken questions of impartiality extremely seriously" throughout and that Prescott's "personal version" does not present the full picture.
Board member Robbie Gibb said that reports of an "orchestrated coup at the top" in the media were "complete nonsense". Robbie Gibb was appointed to the board in 2021 by Boris Johnson, and some see the appointment as subversive. The BBC's chairman, Samir Shah, admitted that the BBC had been slow to react to the issue of Donald Trump's edited speech. However, he told the committee that he did not believe Tim Davey should resign over the issue and that he had been trying to persuade him not to.