“It will take time to emerge from the challenges we all face,” the BBC’s director general Tony Hall said last month, “but the BBC will be there for the public all the way through … As the national broadcaster, the BBC has a special role to play at this time of national need.” But what kind of role should and does such an organisation play during a public health crisis?

The term used by Hall to describe the BBC – the “national broadcaster” – appears nowhere in its editorial guidelines or its royal charter, both of which appeal to the public rather than the nation. Yet it has featured in a number of the director general’s statements in recent years. He has compared the BBC to the military, the monarchy and the NHS, emphasising its indispensability to political and cultural life. These appeals didn’t seem to win the BBC many friends in the corridors of power, but the Covid-19 pandemic has given the broadcaster a renewed sense of purpose, just as its legitimacy crisis was deepening and its relationship with the government reached a nadir.

Hall’s soft nationalism is well suited to crisis management, resonating with popular ideas of British people keeping calm and carrying on. It is also ingrained in the BBC’s history and institutional DNA, and is arguably inherent in the very medium of mass broadcasting that the BBC pioneered. Scholars of broadcasting, and indeed executives of the BBC, have noted the way in which the organisation has acted as “social cement” since the 1920s, fostering a shared sense of communality through royal occasions, sporting events, popular dramas, concerts and festivals.

Digital competitors may have eroded some of this, but it still comes naturally enough to the BBC. In response to the television production standstill, the BBC recently announced a package of sporting events from the archive intended to “unite the nation”, including the 2012 London Olympics, with its famous opening ceremony (“a spectacle that celebrated all that is great about Great Britain”).

This might seem harmless enough under the circumstances, but the rhetoric of “the national broadcaster” also implies, however obliquely, a responsibility to display reverence towards authority and maintain a close relationship with officialdom and the state. Such an approach has historical precedent. Ever since the general strike of 1926 – when the BBC maintained its “independence” in return for making no genuine effort to exercise impartiality, taking the side of the government over the workers – there has been no clear line drawn between it being a state, national or public broadcaster. The BBC has occupied a grey area between authentic independence and direct state control.

Today, there is empirical evidence that the BBC’s output reflects the perspectives of Westminster and Whitehall, along with experts, thinktanks and pundits who operate in or close to that world. In mundane terms, this means that social and geographical proximity to the largely London-based elite significantly increases your chances of being in a BBC editor’s phonebook. But the rather narrow range of opinion that appears in routine BBC reporting is further narrowed during periods of crisis, when governments seek to control information more tightly in accordance with their political strategies.

Our present situation is different to industrial disputes or wars that have tested the BBC in the past, including the situation of total war to which it has been compared. During the second world war, the BBC was brought under the authority of the Ministry of Information, which for a time was headed by its founding father, John Reith. No such arrangements are in place today, and there is no national unity government. However, parliament is shut down and the main party of opposition is in a period of transition, meaning that a key source of criticism is muted.

Just as significant is that, in response to the health crisis, state-sanctioned medical and scientific experts have in effect been incorporated into the state, blurring the line between independent expertise and government policy. Scientific experts and elected politicians are speaking in one voice through managed briefings, which are arguably allowing politicians to escape scrutiny via appeals to scientific authority.

All this makes independent scrutiny of the government’s response to Covid-19 more difficult, and the situation is compounded by the sense of responsibility felt by a self-described national broadcaster that during this crisis is a key medium for government communications. According to its editorial guidelines, the BBC should be delivering essential information in the interests of public safety, but maintaining independence from the government. This should mean ensuring a clear distinction between public service information and independent journalism. The BBC has offered some limited space to criticisms of the government’s slow response to the pandemic and its failure to introduce large-scale testing or provide personal protective equipment, but it has too readily been co-opted into the government’s communication strategy.

Obvious questions are not being raised in daily briefings and obvious international comparisons are not being made. Recently, as the UK daily death toll rose to a level not seen before in Europe, BBC News led on the government’s “Herculean effort” to provide PPE to NHS staff. It then spent the next few days reporting closely on the improving health of the prime minister and on Easter Sunday, as the UK approached 10,000 deaths, the lead story on its its homepage bore the headline: “Boris Johnson hails NHS staff.” This is PR, not journalism, and the lack of scrutiny of policy at such a crucial time will not make the public any safer.

In exceptional circumstances, people tend to turn to governments for guidance and to official sources for information. This is not merely a frightened response, it is also a rational reaction to a situation that requires the authority and coordinating capacities of the state. But these crucial powers also require independent media to scrutinise and challenge the policies, and to provide a range of opinion, expert opinion in particular. As an organisation occupying an awkward position somewhere between an official instrument of the state and an institution of civil society, the BBC is struggling to perform that role.

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