LONDON — The veteran BBC presenter Andrew Neil turned to the camera and did something that had never been done in the British public broadcaster’s history: He chastised a sitting prime minister for not making himself available for a pre-election interview.

In a three-minute monologue broadcast to the nation and widely shared online, Neil took aim at Boris Johnson for refusing to do what every other leader of a major political party had done for years and submit himself to a 30-minute grilling.

“The prime minister of our nation will at times have to stand up to President Trump, President Putin, President Xi of China,” Neil told the people of Britain last week. “So, we’re surely not expecting too much that he spend half an hour standing up to me.”

The televised broadside was both an attempt to hold Johnson to account and an implicit acknowledgement that, against their every effort to prevent it, Neil and the BBC had become part of the story.

In a series of “leaders’ interviews,” Neil had subjected every other major party chief to hostile lines of questioning. Johnson’s most prominent opponent, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, had come off looking particularly bad.

“We have always proceeded in good faith that the leaders would participate. And in every election, they have. All of them. Until this one” — Andrew Neil, BBC interviewer, about Boris Johnson

In failing to persuade the prime minister to appear on the show, the broadcaster had opened itself up to accusations of partiality — in an election campaign in which the BBC has faced accusations of bias and threats to its funding.

“We have always proceeded in good faith that the leaders would participate,” Neil told his viewers. “And in every election, they have. All of them. Until this one.”

Neil’s rant was a tactical move in the “the significance war” the BBC is fighting against a political class that is increasingly attacking its position as the country’s impartial arbiter of national debate, according to Charlie Beckett, a professor in media and communications at the London School of Economics.

As the internet has fractured the media landscape, politicians — and the wider public — have been quicker to question the broadcaster’s assumed role at the center of British life.

“The rules of the game have changed, and the broadcasters haven’t caught up yet,” Beckett said. “I think the Andrew Neil gesture was an example of that.”

Lightning rod

Established just under a century ago, in 1922, the BBC is the world’s oldest and largest national broadcaster. It occupies a place in the British pantheon alongside institutions like the monarchy and the National Health Service.

For decades, it has provided the main course of the country’s media diet, winning the nickname “Auntie,” either for the perceived presumption in deciding what’s best for viewers, its constant presence in the background of family life, or most likely both.

The BBC’s News at Six and News at Ten bulletins, which the major parties hope to lead each day with their campaign messages, are watched by more than 12 million people a week, according to broadcast watchdog Ofcom.

Three in four U.K. adults watch, read or listen to BBC news in some form, while in March the BBC News website was the most visited news site in the U.K. Even those who don’t tune in are likely to come across BBC footage, as it gets clipped, edited and shared on social media by activists, politicians and operatives.

The broadcaster’s omnipresence — and its attempt to present itself as the nation’s political arbiter — have made it a natural target for accusation of bias. Conservative former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attempted to curb the BBC’s powers. Alastair Campbell, the chief spinner in Tony Blair’s Labour administration, went to war with the BBC over its reporting on the lead-up to the conflict in Iraq.

In more recent years, the broadcaster has served as a regular punching bag for Euroskeptics, anti-Brexit activists, Scottish nationalists, and the left, including in particular supporters of Corbyn.

In a two-week period ahead of this week’s general election, between November 11 and November 24, the BBC received a record 24,400 complaints, including allegations of bias against both main parties, according to the Times.

Playing the ref

During the election campaign, the BBC has faced charges of bias from all directions.

Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s campaign coordinator, wrote to BBC Director General Tony Hall in the penultimate week of the campaign to allege bias after Neil failed to pin Johnson down for an interview and “in reporting of the Labour Party and its leadership.”

He argued: “That bias has been reflected in the framing, content and balance of BBC reporting during the campaign. We have recorded numerous examples of more negative treatment, harsher scrutiny and slanted editorial comment about Labour’s leadership, policies and record, as compared with those of the Conservative Party, and submitted them to the BBC.”

“Two-way debates are a massive headache for the Lib Dems” — Mark Leftly, senior PR consultant

Labour Treasury spokesman and former BBC journalist Clive Lewis said the broadcaster frames its coverage of the economy with an assumption that free markets are divorced from democratic control or oversight, thereby limiting what the public believes is possible when it comes to a more radical agenda of government intervention.

“It’s small things like ending [news bulletins] with the financial markets, as if these are very, very important things, which everyone should be concerned about,” he said. He also argued that business correspondents are last to be culled when cuts are made, with those covering public services ousted first. “I really think the BBC needs to get itself in order because if it doesn’t, I think it’s got long-term problems.”

The Liberal Democrats, for their part, were angry that their leader Jo Swinson had been left out of the planned head-to-head debate between Johnson and Corbyn. Swinson threatened legal action, accusing the broadcaster of being “complicit in another establishment stitch-up to shut down debate on the most important issue for generations: Brexit.”

“Two-way debates are a massive headache for the Lib Dems,” said Mark Leftly, a senior consultant at the PR firm Powerscourt and former press secretary to ex-party leader Vince Cable. “They reinforce the sense that voters face a binary choice at this election, and it’s something the BBC should have considered when setting up their debates if it really is to make sure the programs are impartial.”

Johnson’s Conservatives, meanwhile, were quick to push back against Neil’s accusation that they were dodging the interview, pointing out that the prime minister did more than 120 other interviews during the campaign.

“There was nothing to gain out of doing it before and there was definitely nothing to gain out of doing it after the Neil challenge,” said a senior member of the Tory campaign team after the monologue went to air. “It would look like Boris had been bullied into submitting. Andrew Neil made sure it wouldn’t happen by issuing his threatening, saber-rattling diktat.”

‘No agenda’

The BBC was out the blocks early during the campaign to counter the claims of bias.

“In these febrile and politically polarised times it’s hardly surprising that the BBC, which seeks to represent the nation in its entirety, is a lightning rod for political discontent,” Fran Unsworth, the BBC director of news and current affairs, wrote in an article in the Guardian.

The BBC responded to Swinson’s complaints about the debate between Corbyn and Johnson by pointing out that the head-to-head was just one of a number of debates that, taken as a whole, allowed other party leaders plenty of space. It said the one-on-one was a fair way to highlight that only Johnson and Corbyn had the chance to become prime minister, and was prepared to go to court to fight its case.

“We all accept that these things sometimes can’t be resolved in the room and there needs to be some kind of adjudication,” said BBC Head of Newsgathering Jonathan Munro.

Similarly, Kamal Ahmed, the editorial director of BBC News, shot back against Labour’s accusations of bias. “There is no agenda in the BBC against one form of economic model and another form of economic model,” he said. “Covering the stock market is just part of the functioning of a capitalist democracy, which is what we live in.”

One former government adviser complained about a perceived cultural bias in the age and education of the BBC workforce. But Ahmed said the BBC was increasing its output from Salford, Cardiff, Glasgow and Northern Ireland. Being too London-centric “may have been an allegation made some years ago, but it’s something that we’ve moved on hugely,” he argued.

A BBC spokesperson said: “BBC News is here for everyone in the U.K. — wherever they live, whatever their political views. The audience is at the heart of everything we do. Throughout our election coverage, we provide fair and impartial reporting and ensure our audiences have the information they need to decide how to vote.”’

Social media savvy

The BBC has re-tooled itself to embrace the online world in its reporting, both in the focus of its coverage and its own online output.

Mike Wendling, head of the BBC Trending team, has argued that the online discussion can no longer be treated separately to the rest of the debate. Social media face-offs become talking points on the airwaves and real-life gaffes get clipped up and go viral.

“The two things have become so intertwined that it’s pretty impossible to separate them out entirely,” he said. The BBC now has five journalists dedicated to the online “trending” team — the most it has ever had.

“The focus and the resources and the integration of the people who are looking at stuff online, versus people who are looking at what you might call the traditional campaign, is an order of magnitude greater this time around than it ever was in the past,” Wendling said.

“The system of funding out of effectively a general tax bears reflection” — Boris Johnson, U.K. prime minister, on Britain's TV license

The broadcaster’s increased social-media savvy hasn’t prevented it from being dragged into the online fray.

Laura Kuenssberg, the broadcaster’s political editor, has come under particular fire from the left, which accuses her of framing her coverage in favor of the Conservatives. She has changed her Twitter bio to “I know it’s fashionable, but even in 2019 there is nothing big or clever about shooting the messenger.”

Anti-Tory observers seized on an error that meant footage of Johnson laying a wreath in 2016 was used in a news bulletin instead of footage from that day that showed him placing the wreath upside down.

The BBC was quick to dismiss charges that the mistake was part of a covert operation to protect the prime minister. “We would be particularly inept conspirators were we to produce and broadcast a two-hour leaders’ special debate — a debate in which the prime minister was robustly challenged by the public — run highlights of it on our evening bulletins, cover it in full online and yet rely on a clumsy one-second edit in a short news summary the next day as a means to convey our supposed support for the governing party,” Unsworth said in her Guardian article.

The BBC was also forced to complain to the Conservatives over a misleading Facebook advert that used its news footage. The party edited together clips of BBC journalists to make it look like they agreed with the campaign narrative that parliament had been deadlocked over Brexit. The broadcaster complained to Facebook, which took it down after it had been seen hundreds of thousands of times.

No matter the outcome of the election, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the BBC — and its reputation — has also been put to the test during the campaign. And further tests could follow.

In the final week of the race, following Andrew Neil’s televised rebuke, Johnson suggested he would look at abolishing the license-fee funding model, which Britons must pay to access BBC content legally. “The system of funding out of effectively a general tax bears reflection,” he said on a campaign stop. “How long can you justify a system whereby everybody who has a TV has to pay to fund a particular set of TV and radio channels?”

Corbyn — who once complained that there was “not one story on any election anywhere in the U.K. that the BBC will not spin into a problem for me” — has also proposed reforms to the broadcaster. He has called for the BBC to publish data on the social class of its workforce and external contributors, to help increase diversity in the media and increase accountability. He also floated proposals to reinvent the BBC for the digital age.

Instead of a neutral arbiter, the BBC has become — despite its best efforts — one of the combatants.

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