The dust is settling on the BBC’s latest crisis over its sloppy editing of a Donald Trump video, but it won’t be long before the next blunder. The reality is that every BBC crisis is epiphenomenal: the anger that periodically flares up against the BBC is rooted in our frustration that it fails to do the impossible and provide cultural order and unity. This is hard to articulate, so we magnify secondary issues like the pay of its top presenters, and perceived bias in the news. In doing so, we ignore the real problem: that the BBC can’t win.

We can no longer trust the BBC to shelter us from the winds of the international entertainment industry

Providing common culture in a diverse nation has never been easy. In its formative decades, the BBC succeeded in pulling off this juggling act. The

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