Trust in the BBC is heavily tied to political identity

Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and Deborah Turness, its news CEO, have resigned over accusations of political bias in the corporation. Most notably, these relate to the editing of an episode of Panorama about the January 6 insurrection, which US president Donald Trump says misrepresented him.

Their departure is the latest – and most dramatic – chapter in story that dates back years. At first glance, the move may look like accountability at the top.

“There have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility,” said Davie in his resignation message. But Davie’s departure also speaks to the problems that have beset the BBC for years as it has tried to deal with a decline in trust.

The data tells a clear and worrying story: the problem is not only what the BBC does, but how it is seen across divided audiences.

Trust in the BBC is heavily conditioned by political identity. A survey I conducted with colleagues of 11,170 people in the UK, carried out between December 2022 and June 2024, showed striking differences between how people with left and right-wing party affiliations felt about the broadcaster.

Liberal Democrat voters averaged 4.54 on a one-to-seven trust scale. Those who vote Labour averaged 3.88. Trust among Conservative voters was lower at an average of 3.17. And notably, the average was just 2.16 for Brexit party voters. The findings date back to a time before the Brexit party became Reform UK – and before that party came to dominate in the polls.

In other words, those segments of the electorate that already felt most alienated from the BBC are now among the most politically ascendant.

That creates a profound legitimacy challenge. The broadcaster is losing the trust of the very audiences who, through the ballot box, are increasingly shaping the political environment in which it operates.

This helps explain why the crisis has erupted now. The political currents that distrusted the BBC for years are no longer fringe, but central to national politics.

When we asked respondents to place themselves on a political spectrum of left to right, we saw a similar patterns. Trust peaked around the centre-left, dropped at the centre, and stayed low on the right. The pattern clearly indicates that trust in the BBC is not uniform, nor does it develop in a vacuum.

We found in our research that these partisan fault lines were not in evidence for Japan’s public broadcaster – suggesting something specific is happening in the UK. In Japan, attitudes toward NHK (the equivalent of the BBC) cut across political lines, with conservatives and progressives reporting broadly similar levels of trust.

That contrast points to distinct political cultures. In Japan, public broadcasting still carries an aura of neutrality tied to institutional continuity, whereas in Britain, the BBC has become a symbolic battlefield in wider culture wars. The British media landscape is more openly adversarial, and perceptions of bias are now interpreted through partisan identity rather than journalistic performance.

Conservative-voting or Brexit-aligned respondents appear to see the BBC as metropolitan and institutionally liberal. On the left and centre-left, the BBC still retains a credibility cushion, but those holdouts will shrink. This is not simply about “bias” or “impartiality” in a narrow sense – it is about legitimacy in different political worldviews.

The fact that two senior figures have resigned should not lull us into thinking the problem has been fixed. On the contrary, what this moment reveals is that the BBC’s challenge is not only managerial – it is political and cultural.

The data from the TrustTracker project shows that trust in the BBC is already deeply polarised. Leadership change alone is unlikely to rebuild it. Instead, the BBC must engage with how it is perceived, by whom, and why. Otherwise, it risks losing the one thing that has set it apart: its role as a genuinely shared public broadcaster in a deeply divided society.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Steven David Pickering, Brunel University of London

Read more:

• BBC resignations over Trump scandal show the pressures on public broadcasters – and why they must resist them
• The BBC is a partisan battleground – why does Japan’s public broadcaster escape the same fate?
• Why the BBC has a licence fee and what might happen if it were scrapped

Steven David Pickering received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, reference ES/W011913/1) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS, reference JPJSJRP 20211704).