The BBC’s friends are starting to worry about it. At a time when we urgently need public media to reinvent itself, its leadership seems insular and inert. The only real signs of life are during a reputational crises, when the management swings into action only to look both autocratic and anarchic. We saw this most recently with the Editorial Complaints Unit’s baffling ruling against Naga Munchetty for her remarks about racism. BBC staff spoke privately of a climate of fear as the criticisms mounted, only for the director general, Tony Hall, to eventually overrule the decision after days of fierce public controversy.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s political reporting, which lies at the heart of its public service remit, seems ever more entangled in the world of Westminster, managing to appear both frivolous and elitist. Leading figures at the BBC have made much of the rise of “fake news”, yet too often its journalists have failed to challenge disinformation at the heart of our political system.

Earlier this week, after Peter Oborne wrote that senior BBC executives told him they were reluctant to expose the lies told by a prime minister for fear of undermining public trust in politics, the BBC responded by defending its willingness to identify untruths – but confirmed that it would not say a prime minister was “a liar”.

Research shows that its reporting is strongly shaped by corporate interests, state officials and the political elite

From many traditional supporters there is disillusionment, even anger. Parts of the left have long been wary of the BBC, but equally if not more worrying for the BBC is the growing antipathy of many centrists. Once its strongest supporters, they now accuse the BBC of biased reporting on Brexit.

As defenders of the BBC never tire of pointing out, allegations of bias come from all sides. Many are misconceived or overwrought. But this doesn’t mean that all criticisms can be dismissed as if every claim were equal.

Those alleging rightwing bias at the BBC often point to the role of Sarah Sands – the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph and Evening Standard – as editor of the Today programme, or the Tories’ recruitment of Craig Oliver and Robbie Gibb to No 10 from the BBC.

But the influence of rightwing editors and journalists, while not insignificant, misses the longer standing establishment orientation of the BBC. Academic research shows that its reporting is strongly shaped by corporate interests, state officials and the political elite – the government of the day in particular. And even some BBC loyalists concede that it too often follows the agenda set by the rightwing press.

Behind these patterns of reporting is an organisation long shaped by officialdom – which, since the market-based reforms imposed by John Birt in the 1990s, has been increasingly influenced by the commercial culture of the private sector. More recently it has drifted further right, pushed and pulled by Tory and Tory-led governments that squeezed its funding and reshaped the political culture and agenda to which its editors defer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Criticising the influence of rightwing staff misses the longer standing establishment orientation of the BBC.’ Sarah Sands with George Osborne in 2014. Photograph: David M. Benett/Getty Images

Former executives now lament George Osborne’s abuse of the last charter renewal process, which drew the BBC into the government’s austerity agenda by forcing it to cover the cost of the licence fee for over-75s. But the longstanding structural limits to the BBC’s independence and impartiality are still rarely acknowledged. Ultimately it is an organisation accountable not to the public, nor even to parliament, but to the heart of government – and this continues to shape the culture of its newsrooms and its political programming. It’s not that presenters and reporters take instructions from the government or anyone else, as is sometimes alleged. But like any organisation, the BBC has a particular working culture based around policies, conventions and incentives that influence how the people who work there behave, as well as who is appointed or promoted.

At the top, there is a board made up of a mix of senior BBC managers, government appointees and other establishment figures. Beneath them is a highly paid group of executives, disproportionately drawn from private schools and Oxbridge, who know that the BBC depends on governments for its funding and its long-term survival. Then there are the BBC’s senior political journalists, whose work defines the tone of its output. Fiona Bruce, Evan Davis, Mishal Husain, Laura Kuenssberg, Emily Maitlis and Nick Robinson are all paid upwards of £250,000 a year and, with the exception of Kuenssberg, all attended Oxbridge colleges. All this shapes the BBC’s collective sense of how political stories should be reported, how “due impartiality” should be construed, and how competing claims of bias should be negotiated.

And it is this basic establishment orientation that accounts for the current crisis of legitimacy the corporation faces. The BBC has always had an extremely close relationship with the British state – until the 1990s its staff were secretly vetted by MI5 – and a certain common sense around macroeconomic issues became embedded in its economic and business reporting even before the 2008 crash. Thus the leftward shift of the Labour party, and the rise of the anti-austerity, anti-war politics that underpin it, were as much of an anathema to the BBC as they are to the broader establishment of which it is part.

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Brexit, meanwhile, poses enormous challenges to journalism in general, but for the BBC they are especially acute since it has similarly disrupted its typical compass for impartiality: elite consensus. The majority of officials and business executives are opposed to Brexit, as are the vast majority of independent experts, but the government has sought to press ahead nevertheless. The electorate, meanwhile, remains fairly evenly split. In such circumstances, balancing opinion – public or elite – with expertise poses significant editorial dilemmas, and the BBC has been widely criticised for failing to challenge misinformation and misconduct by Brexit campaigners.

BBC political journalists have sought to ride the storm by sticking to their conventional model of embedded reporting: describing the political wrangling and relaying the competing claims and counterclaims. But this has only exposed it to further accusations of bias. Even at the best of times BBC journalism tends to lean towards the government of the day, while the ostensibly neutral “he said, she said” approach too often means relaying disinformation at odds with the BBC’s public purpose. The current election will be a major test for the BBC, but in the long run we will need to address some of the longstanding structural problems that our current circumstances have brought to the surface.

• Tom Mills is a lecturer in sociology at Aston University. He is the author of The BBC: Myth of a Public Service