As a core element of a great power’s system of information and indoctrination, the BBC is bound to be a fiercely contested space. In the journalists’ jargon, it is always being ‘rocked’ by scandals, real and imagined. But the BBC now faces two new challenges, and it is not at all clear that it will survive them.

First, broadcasting is giving way to digital platforms as the decisive venue in which public, and especially political, speech is produced and consumed. Second, since the financial crisis in 2008, Britain’s Thatcherite economic and political settlement has been very obviously failing. This failure is generating an intensifying crisis of plausibility for the state form in which the BBC sits, and which the BBC does so much to make vivid in the minds of its audiences.

The idea that Britain is a stable country going through a brief episode of uncharacteristic turbulence still has some traction among its more materially comfortable citizens, including many of its media executives. But the post-crisis record is one of consistent incompetence, corruption and declining state capacity. The BBC’s role in reconciling the public to the governing and owning classes’ agenda has implicated it in the banking collapse, austerity, the Brexit débacle, the information war against a left-wing Labour Party, Johnson, and Truss, and Starmer’s doomed attempt to revive Thatcherism under the banner of managerial competence. And while the BBC struggles to exonerate the established order, digitally enabled media-political entrepreneurs can make good money attacking it.

A recent story in Byline Times brings these extraordinary difficulties into sharp focus. In March of this year the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee held a meeting to discuss ‘low trust issues with Reform voters’. Minutes of the meeting seen by Adam Bienkov state that ‘the CEO, News and Current Affairs provided the Committee with a presentation on plans to address’ these issues. The minutes go on to say that ‘the Committee discussed the presentation. Committee members recognised the importance of local BBC teams in the plan, given their closeness to audiences. Directors discussed how story selection and other types of output, such as drama, also had a role to play. An update on progress would return to a future meeting.’

There is a deep irony here. After the banking collapse, the BBC sought out a politician who could channel the fury of those in the country who had already suffered from deindustrialisation, were going through a steep recession, and would soon feel the effects of austerity. 

They hit on Nigel Farage. He was an elected representative, albeit in the European Parliament. More importantly, he could embody and enact the supposed feelings of ‘ordinary people’ in terms that did not challenge the fundamentals of the Thatcherite settlement. Hostility to the EU and to migration could be accommodated: both had been part of Thatcher’s own political imaginary, after all. A reckoning with the causes of the financial crisis and its links to declining state capacity at home, and increasing criminality abroad, could not. But while Farage became a national figure through broadcasts of the BBC’s own Question Time, he remains one in part through narrowcasts via Cameo, TikTok and GB News. Meanwhile the remnants of the right-wing press continue to amplify him and his messaging.

The BBC responded to Bienkov’s request for comment by telling him that its Royal Charter requires it ‘to reflect and represent all the communities of the UK’. Furthermore, its ‘Editorial Guidelines’ place it under an obligation to ‘take account of the different political parties with electoral support across the UK to achieve due impartiality’. As it stands it would appear that it is trying to do this through closed room presentations and discussions, the minutes of which are then leaked by their horrified junior staff. While the leaks are new, the closed rooms are not. This is how the BBC has managed ‘story selection’ since it presided over the information system of a global empire.

But if the BBC really wants to win back the trust of all its audiences it could open up the room. This wouldn’t be technically difficult, or even particularly novel. The corporation only needs to convene a randomly selected assembly to address two questions: 1) How well does the current BBC represent and reflect all the communities of the UK?; and 2) How well does it take account of the different political parties with electoral support across the UK?

This assembly could hold hearings and take presentations from the various political parties in the Westminster Parliament, and from other political groups and civil society organisations that reached a defined threshold on an online voting platform: 100,000 signatures, say. After these briefings it could interview past and present BBC staff and others, as it wished. All its hearings would be televised and live-streamed, and the final report would include a film signed off by its members. The BBC and the various political parties could then make a formal response to the report. The assembly would have the last word, to the politicians and to the media executives, as is only right.

This assembly would be assisted by a facilitating committee that includes representatives from those same political parties, and from groups that scored particularly highly in the online petition, as well as BBC employees. The mini-assembly could choose to add members to this committee, and to dismiss others. One of its duties would be to publish its verdict on the candour and helpfulness of committee members and witnesses. Apart from anything else this would constitute a fun genre of ‘reality’ content: the spectacle of people much like the audience holding powerful people to account, and conferring honour on those they think deserve it.

It could consist of 99 members of the public, with a non-voting chair chosen by it from the committee. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly on constitutional reform in 2016 was structured more or less like this, and it is widely accepted, even by opponents of democratisation, to have worked pretty well. 

The BBC is big and complicated but it is not as big and complicated as the Republic of Ireland. It could be paid generously, and have access to the BBC archives and other resources. At 99 members it would inevitably include a diversity of life experiences and world-views that the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee cannot possibly match. It would have no particular expertise in the media, but each of its members would be an expert in making sense of the world from their particular perspective. Its findings would not be authoritative. But they would be informative in a strong sense: they would give us a direct insight into the informed opinions of people who are normally spoken for by others. What better way to begin to restore trust?

Randomly selected assemblies have been successfully used to deliberate on a wide range of issues, including public media. The organisers of a mini-assembly on broadcasting found that ‘given enough information and opportunity to discuss, participants were very capable of discussing the complexities of public service provision, and establishing a view on what aspects of that provision were most important.’ If mini-assemblies have a structural weakness it is their reliance on elite media to publicise their findings. Assessing the performance of a public media operation is not beyond our capacities. And if the mini-assembly has independent access to a mass audience they will wield power of a kind that concentrates minds — their own and ours.

A recent YouGov poll found that 85% of Reform supporters distrusted the BBC, according to a report on the Times website. This is eye-catching but those who voted for Labour because of Corbyn’s social democratic programme are probably equally disenchanted, even if no one with a budget has asked them. An assembly would include quite a few of these, otherwise invisible, people. And it would also have ample opportunity to hear the perspectives of socialists, anarchists, environmentalists and others who feature less prominently on primetime television than Nigel Farage. We cannot predict what such a body will conclude. ​​But if the BBC is a media institution dedicated to public service it should be eager to help us find out.