BBC Director-General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness have announced their resignations. In a statement, Davie said: “Overall, the BBC functions successfully, but mistakes were made, and as Director-General I take responsibility for them.”
The resignations follow a scandal sparked by a report published about a week ago in The Telegraph. The newspaper revealed an internal memo written by Michael Prescott, who served as an independent expert on the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee until June 2025 and was previously political editor of The Sunday Times.
In the 19-page document, Prescott detailed breaches of journalistic impartiality in coverage of topics ranging from Donald Trump’s presidency in the US to migration, race, gender, and the war in Gaza. He said committee members had repeatedly raised these concerns with BBC leadership, including Davie and Turness, but their warnings were either ignored or dismissed.
The memo, addressed to the BBC board, also explained Prescott’s reasons for leaving the Editorial Standards Committee.
He argued that distortions in the corporation’s editorial policy emerge as early as the stage of topic selection and prioritization. As an example, he cited September 2023, when the BBC News app sent users twelve push notifications about sexual assault allegations against comedian Russell Brand, but none about the migration crisis in the United Kingdom, where arrivals and accommodation costs had reached record highs.
The document also claims that the BBC department overseeing LGBTQ+ coverage effectively engages in censorship—systematically blocking materials that contradict its “activist” stance. According to Prescott, three employees of the corporation—a presenter, a reporter, and a producer—had complained to him about this. The BBC, he said, devotes significant attention to bureaucratic challenges faced by people undergoing gender transition, while reporting little on the medical risks associated with the process.
Prescott believes the BBC presents the concept of gender identity as an established fact, even though it remains a matter of public and scientific debate.
The corporation’s Arabic service came under equally sharp criticism. According to Prescott, in its coverage of the war in Gaza it systematically took at face value statements from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other armed groups—including claims about casualty figures and allegations that Israel had staged the shelling of the town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 people, most of them children.