When the Telegraph revealed earlier this month that Donald Trump’s January 6 speech had been misleadingly edited by the BBC’s Panorama, few could have anticipated the scale of the fallout. Public anger was swift and despite an apology from the BBC, the US President insisted he would attempt to sue the corporation for $5 billion. The Beeb is now in a genuine crisis after the resignations of both Tim Davie, the former director-general, and Deborah Turness, the former head of BBC News.

Yesterday, senior corporation figures were grilled in Parliament by the Commons select committee. BBC Chair Samir Shah said that the edit of Trump’s speech split opinion on the board, insisting that “there was a case” for the edit. But if there was a robust case for the edit, would it have appeared so egregious to most who saw the unedited clip? MP and observers have understandably framed this as an issue of impartiality or progressive bias.

Yet the leaked internal memo by former BBC external adviser Michael Prescott, which prompted the investigation, points to something deeper. Its catalogue of failures, from selective migration alerts to one-sided transgender coverage and misreported Gaza statistics, suggest not mere partisanship but a systemic worldview problem. The secular-liberal framework is so deeply embedded in the corporation’s culture that it shapes which stories are deemed newsworthy, whose perspectives are legitimised, and which assumptions are treated as neutral.

This is not a grab-bag of unrelated mistakes. The memo reveals a single governing logic shaping editorial decisions across race, gender, migration, populism, and global conflict. Yet BBC figures insist the institution is not biased, with board member Robbie Gibb claiming yesterday that impartiality runs “through his bones”. The truth is subtler but more worrying. The BBC is not failing because it is biased towards the Left or Right. Rather, it is failing because it cannot recognise the blind spots in its own worldview.

At its core, secular liberalism is committed to individual liberty, equality before the law, pluralism, and fair governance. These principles have helped shape the modern world, and countries which do not subscribe to such values are demonstrably less desirable places to live. But these same principles are procedural rather than substantive: they outline how society should operate, not what is good or virtuous. There is a natural alignment with progressive ethics, since procedural equality logically pushes toward recognising the rights of historically excluded groups. In a plural society, secular liberalism cannot appeal to traditional religious or metaphysical authority, so it borrows progressive ethics to justify moral imperatives such as equality and anti-discrimination. Yet this borrowed morality is far from “neutral”, and therein lies the tension. The worldview is not declared but assumed. This is why institutions like the BBC often mistake it for objectivity.

We can see how this worldview shapes every issue highlighted in the Prescott memo. Senior staff did not accept that the Panorama edit was a problem because, within their belief system, it genuinely did not appear as one. Identity and structural oppression are treated as the primary moral truths, so even weak stories on racism were amplified because they “fit the worldview”. The same logic governs the BBC’s Israel-Gaza framing: oppression becomes the default interpretive lens, flattening a complex conflict into a morality tale. One-sided trans coverage follows a similar pattern. Gender identity is treated as a civil rights issue rather than a claim about the human person — the purest expression of the secular-liberal blind spot. The BBC’s so-called “biases” are not the result of conspiracies or activist capture, as critics often suggest, but of a moral lens the institution cannot perceive or interrogate.

The paradox is that impartiality cannot fix this problem because it assumes ideological symmetry. In other words, there can be no clear declarations about what is right and wrong because it dissolves into moral relativism. The corporation believes it is being neutral even as it advances its most deeply embedded ideological assumptions. No policy on impartiality, diversity training, or editorial board reshuffle can resolve this deficit of moral literacy.

This crisis reflects a broader institutional failure visible across universities, courts, charities, and political parties. Secular liberalism cannot adjudicate moral questions while claiming neutrality; in practice, it enforces a covert moral framework it cannot name. The BBC’s planned overhaul of its editorial investigations, and Shah’s suggestion of creating a new deputy director role to ease the burden, do nothing to address this deeper issue.

Until Britain reckons with the moral assumptions embedded in its institutions, controversies over gender, race, migration, populism, and geopolitics will continue unabated. Each one will circle the same blind spots, all the while obscuring the real questions beneath.

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Jide Ehizele writes on faith, culture, and belonging in modern Britain.

OBEhizele

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