If Donald Trump destroys the BBC, there would be a horrible historical logic – so here's who I would pick as Tim Davie's replacement

Historians may cite last week as the beginning of the end for British broadcasting. On Remembrance Sunday, 9 November, both the BBC and ITV faced threats to their existence as we know them.

As the corporation lost its two most senior editorial figures at once – director-general Tim Davie and chief executive of news Deborah Turness resigned over the handling of complaints about an episode of Panorama that misleadingly edited a speech by President Trump – ITV was considering a reported bid of £1.6 billion from Comcast (the American owners of Sky) for all of its on-air networks and the ITVX streaming site.

The ITV story is simply financial. Television advertising and sponsorship are collapsing and so ITV’s shareholders perhaps hope to release the value in the broadcast business before it falls further. The logic for Comcast is presumably the possibility of selling advertising and subscriptions across a super suite of digital and terrestrial channels.

However, as ITV Studios, which provides most of ITV’s content, would now be separately owned, it’s unclear how the supply line of shows such as Coronation Street and I’m a Celebrity… might be affected in future.

The BBC situation is also financial, though complicatedly and now doubly so. It is massively funded (and its pension scheme underwritten) by £3.66 billion of licence-fee income. But support for what some see as a legally enforced broadcasting tax has reduced during a series of scandals – and dissent will surely have been accelerated by recent events. Negotiation with the Government of a new BBC Charter (from 2027) – including funding methods – starts next month, though with the BBC currently lacking a team to attend and a Trump lawsuit still hanging over them.

Having threatened to sue for $1 billion unless he received an apology and compensation he regarded as adequate, last week Trump got a qualified “sorry” (though the BBC still claims the speech tampering was accidental) and no money. Trump has not publicly accepted the apology and has warned he will still sue for “between 1 and 5 billion dollars.” The new risk for the BBC is whether to use licence fee money to fight a very rich American President in court. Doing so would please many staff, though further inflame enemies.

So what went wrong at the BBC? On Monday 10 November on Radio 4, Today presenter Nick Robinson delivered an on-air monologue that described a right-wing conspiracy – of newspapers, politicians, think tanks – seeking to bring down the BBC. That’s half the story – there are businesses and politicians who crave a reduced or removed BBC. The crucial other half of the story is that the BBC, and especially BBC News, keeps handing lethal weapons to its enemies.

If the BBC were to be destroyed by Trump, there would be a horrible historical logic. BBC News has a decade-long history of getting the 45th and 47th Presidents catastrophically wrong. On US election day 2016, a senior journalist (still on the payroll) announced that, as Trump had no chance of winning, discussion should turn to President Hillary Clinton’s policies. Again, last November, a BBC viewer might have concluded that Kamala Harris would win and perhaps (and this is where it becomes editorially problematic) should win.

It’s understandable that many, even most, BBC staff might personally have preferred on two occasions a female president to an oddly coiffed, strangely tanned former presenter of The Apprentice, found liable in civil law for sexual offences and whom they regard as anti-democratic. But journalists should report what they see, not what they hope. (This seems also to have been an issue in some coverage of Brexit and the Gaza war.)

Much of the BBC (with the exception of some on the Americast podcast) never took Trump seriously, but the current consequences of crossing him show how serious he can get.

Another ominous aspect for the BBC is a sense of multiple crises gathering. As front pages of newspapers reported the downfall of Davie and Turness, middle pages contained stories about the BBC Complaints Unit upholding 20 complaints against newsreader Martine Croxall for changing the words “pregnant people” on her autocue to “women”, while making a facial expression interpreted as disapproving.

Some titles also serialised or summarised Andy Webb’s Dianarama, a new book about the 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana that a retired judge later found to have been secured by reporter Martin Bashir through faked documents and false claims.

For two Panoramas almost 30 years apart to be found guilty of serious journalistic malpractice – with Webb’s book further deflating the reputation of some former bosses – suggests something more endemic than occasionally accidental.

After what can be seen as slow and clumsy reactions since the Trump Panorama problem was known months ago, BBC Chair Dr Samir Shah might not need his free 2026 BBC desk diary. A basic rule of journalism is that, if you call someone “litigious”, they sue harder and Shah foolishly called Trump that.

In his statement on the departure of Davie and Turness Dr Shah seems to be representing and defending the interests of BBC staff and executives rather than licence-fee payers. That has long been a fault line in the corporation and apart from the future funding model, the supervisory and disciplinary structures of the BBC will be a huge part of Charter renegotiation, whoever leads it.

If I were in the nightmare scenario of being BBC Chair, I would appoint Dorothy Byrne, smart and tough former head of Channel 4 journalism, for six months as interim DG. After that, who knows?

The two current broadcast empire meltdowns may overlap because any sale of ITV could release senior talent, including CEO Dame Carolyn McCall and director of television Kevin Lygo. However, such is the BBC mess – with potentially more to come – that, were they to begin an application, family and friends would surely divert them at once to a psychiatrist.

It has come to this: no sane person would take what was, until now, the biggest job in British broadcasting.

Read more:

• So, is it all over for our national broadcasters like the BBC and ITV? Not so fast
• Former BBC News boss argues BBC's "survival is at stake" amid "chilling" political landscape

Check out more of our TV coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.