Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: The BBC scandal impacts trust across all media

Well, at least someone's resigned at the BBC. 

In fact, two have resigned, both the director general and the boss of news - and the fact that this bias scandal at the BBC has claimed two of the most senior executives there tells you how serious it is.

And it's not just serious for the BBC, it's serious for basically all the mainstream media outlets in the English-speaking world.

Because even though the rest of us didn't splice together two pieces of what Donald Trump said to make it sound like he was encouraging his followers to take a fight to the capital, and even though the rest of us didn't hire the son of a Hamas official to voice a documentary about Gaza, many of us take the BBC's content, don't we? Often unchecked.

There are some media organizations out there that are so beyond reproach that other media outlets - like ourselves - will take their content and not re-verify it, because it's the BBC and we shouldn't have to re-verify it.

And if they're infected by bias, we all become infected by bias, don't we?

Whether it's their obvious bias on Gaza, their bias on trans issues, their bias on Trump - which they have been well and truly busted for - their bias becomes everybody else's bias, because we're taking their content.

This is the kind of stuff that has crashed and still continues to crash public trust in the media, because if you thought that the media was unfair on Trump, now you've been proven right.

And if you thought that the media was soft on Hamas, now you've been proven right. If you thought that there was all this stuff going on where the media had fixed views on trans issues, now you've been proven right.

All you need to do is look at that whistle-blower's dossier that was leaked last week. For the most part, that will explain all of it to you.

And by the way, as a member of the media, my faith in the BBC has been really eroded by what's just happened - not just because they sliced together two pieces of Trump's speech to make him say something he didn't say, but because they knew it and sat on it for so long.

This happened a year ago. It took a whistle-blower's frustration to eventually write a dossier and then to leak it explicitly - because the BBC weren't doing anything about it - for the BBC to actually do something about it, like the resignations that we've seen in the last 24 hours.

It's not good enough what's happened at the BBC, and jeez, if this is how media outlets are still behaving in 2025, despite all the evidence that they are losing public trust - it's gonna take a really long time for us all to get it back.

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