Wokeness operates as a virus. After infection, an organisation ceases to fulfil its original function and becomes a conduit for the ideology. The BBC is an obvious case in point. Once a bastion of impartiality and editorial rigour, over the past decade it has enabled activist staff to impose their identity-obsessed worldview onto the public and to punish those who fail to comply. The virus has retained its potency because those in charge have refused to accept that they have been infected.

However, there are signs that the new Director General, Matt Brittin, is aware of the problem and is seeking a remedy. In an address to staff this week, Brittin pledged to build a “sat nav around bias” using data taken from analysis of the corporation’s news coverage and other programmes in a bid to improve impartiality. While the details haven’t yet been fleshed out, it is positive to see the BBC take its problems with bias seriously. Still, it is unclear whether such measures can make any difference, given that those responsible for the prior failures remain in their positions.

For all the denials, the evidence of ideological capture is overwhelming, and it will take root-and-branch reform to remove. In an interview with UnHerd published this month, Fran Unsworth, former director of BBC News, revealed that she was driven out of her job by zealots within the corporation. “There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things,” she said. “People didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them; all that safe-spaces shit.” Rob Burley, a former senior editor at the BBC, revealed in his account for UnHerd how the corporation “took a side in the culture war” and allowed its pursuit of younger audiences and an obsession with diversity and inclusion initiatives to skew its editorial judgement. This will come as no surprise to those of us who have repeatedly drawn attention to the BBC’s tendency to refer to male rapists as female.

Such negligence is a direct consequence of institutional deference to gender identity ideology, which would also explain the existence of the BBC’s “LGBT desk”, staffed by activists who were empowered to “keep other perspectives off the air” according to a leaked internal dossier. Given what we now know, it is astonishing that the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, had the audacity to claim that “recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”

This stubborn refusal to confront reality is precisely why the BBC has been unable to escape the trap it created for itself. There was never any justification for the corporation to issue guidelines encouraging its staff to add pronouns to emails. Or for it to instruct staff to take a day’s paid leave after the death of George Floyd to educate themselves on Critical Race Theory, even going so far as to recommend texts on “Whiteness”, “The End of Policing” and “The Urgency of Intersectionality”. Or to spend £100 million on improving diversity in its output, when minority groups were already represented at levels equivalent to or above national population estimates.

In order to be cured of the woke virus, the BBC must first accept that it is infected. Brittin’s push to monitor impartiality is an important first step, but large-scale change needs to be conducted. Defenders of the corporation who insist that it takes great pains to avoid favouring the Left or the Right are missing the point. This capture is ideological, not party-political. When it comes to the identitarian religion of our times, the BBC has been its most avid proselytiser.

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Andrew Doyle is the author of The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.

andrewdoyle_com

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