Fascinating article about the failure and complicity of the BBC regarding transactivism

[lcakethereforeIam]

In Unherd

https://archive.ph/hxJFg

https://unherd.com/2026/05/inside-the-capture-of-the-bbc/?edition=us

Long but worth a read.

This accompanying article is almost a TLDR

https://archive.ph/9ST3v

https://unherd.com/newsroom/bbc-is-full-of-progressive-madness-says-former-news-chief/?edition=us

Thanks for this - got part way through and it is really useful to understand the timeline. Will need to come back to it later!

Wow! This is fascinating stuff. Thank you @lcakethereforeIam

Also, @KnottyAuty, was hoping you’d spot this!

OP, thanks for posting this. It is long, but clear and to the point. I've read only half of it so far, but this information should be top story on every media outlet, especially the BBC. Just confirms me in my decision to cancel my TV licence early last year, as I finally decided that not paying for (and thereby continuing to prop up) an insidious, lying, regressive "news" organization was a small price to pay (pardon the pun) for receiving threatening letters every few weeks.

It's all there, everything women have been saying for years: the threats, intimidation, cancellations, the activist capture, all hiding in plain sight, while people who knew better, but wanted to keep their fat salaries, ignored it all.

One strange thing I noticed, all the American spelling (I am American) -wonder what that's about?

Anyway, off to read the rest of it!

Thanks for the link

"One senior presenter despairs for an organization out of touch with its license-fee payers: “We seem obsessed with drag queens. We are in a terrible mess at the BBC.” Another wants drastic action: “There’s no sign of anyone getting a grip on anything,” he tells me. “The only solution is getting rid of them all. It’s like cutting out cancer. You have to just do it.”

It's like they read our minds! 🤯 It all comes back to Stonewall. 😤

An important article, if the damage is to be undone, it's important to know how it got done in the first place. Quite frankly I don't see the BBC coming back from this, yet another thing destroyed by this batshittery. Too many licence fee payers have lost faith in them and will continue to stop paying for the dross that is the BBC's output nowadays.

I'm not going back, I haven't watched or read anything from them for months and I haven't missed the BBC at all. 😁

It's all there, everything women have been saying for years: the threats, intimidation, cancellations, the activist capture, all hiding in plain sight, while people who knew better, but wanted to keep their fat salaries, ignored it all.

this is so true.

Interesting article. And confirms that everything that the women here concluded, did in fact happen.

The women on mumsnet got to where this article is bloody years ago. And fully identified all its points.

Oh God, have you ever seen what passes for news in other parts of the world? The US has become an absolute joke, despite all the posturing about free speech they were doing a couple of years ago.

I want the Beeb to take responsibility for the trans debacle, but you really are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I prefer the Beeb as a U.K. public-funded counterpoint to all the billionaire-backed “news” channels and social media networks and their kowtowing to the new American kleptocracy. Give me journalism by pointy elbowed middle class British strivers over billionaire’s minions any day, at least we can plausibly argue the former should be responsible to us!

About Unsworth:

Nonetheless, her overwhelming preoccupation was to remain neutral because she knew, from numerous examples, how that same “staff power” often prevailed at BBC News. “I was only too aware,” she says, “that I could have been cancelled by my own staff, not just on this subject, but on all sorts of subjects.” The fact that she thought she might be taken down by progressive staff by forcing them to get to grips with a contested subject tells you everything you need to know about where the BBC had ended up.

and yet

This fear of the threat from some staff to her position and well-being hastened her departure: “I would actually say it drove me out, just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult."

I find this especially telling: whether it's because she's a woman, or simply because she was someone in charge who needed to be "dealt with", this paragraph in particular just shows that there was nothing she could have done that was "right" except toe the Stonewall line. And, even after everything she had done to toe the line, she still felt pushed out.

Just what we have been saying about the activists all this time: nothing except complete and utter capitulation will ever be enough. And, even then, they want more.

Thanks OP. That's a great article.
As the BBC is funded by us and purports to be the state broadcaster it's critical that it's harmful bias and appalling behaviour over trans issues is called out . This article does it in depth and very well.

We know that despite their recent "commitment to impartiality and free speech" the bias clearly demonstrated in the article still exists. They'll have to do much better in the future than uttering a few embarrassed, accurate pronouns.

Yes, I am well aware of what passes for journalism in the US. It's not, and never was, anything like what the BBC used to offer.

But the BBC is also not what it used to be, and I used to hold the BBC up as a shining example of what journalism should be. For me, and many others, it's simply no longer fit for purpose. I get all the news I need now from other sources, as do a lot of people.

I choose not to watch TV anymore and therefore I choose not to pay for it. If you want to continue to pay for the BBC, that's your prerogative.

Only half way through but well worth a read, thank you.

a blind commitment to diversity and inclusion schemes, and a culture of intolerance

In fact, a blind commitment to severely LIMITING and restricting diversity and inclusion by controlling and manipulating the words and concepts to the advantage of small, powerful political and fantastically intolerant groups. This was about making 'diversity and inclusion' work to achieve the exact opposite.

Davie’s failure to grasp the journalistic implications of this is best exemplified by his use, as late as 2024, of the lazy mantra: “We have to be kind and caring in this and listen to people, and be nice!”

Which was, in actual reality rather than identified reality, enable and indulge certain politically identified groups unconditionally with extreme priviledge, while being extremely unkind and uncaring and erasing other people with different views. It was not being nice. It was a comfortable lie to avoid taking responsibility for very bad actions, and to participate in an elite group belief that enforcing these things on unwilling plebs - punishing dissenters, harming and overwhelming and actively hiding evidence of harms and the victims of these actions - was for some greater good.

In the opinion of this special elite group, who believed themselves superior to people Not Like Them.

This is one hell of a lot more serious on multiple levels than 'failure'. DEI was a concept intended to prevent this kind of control and abuse by the privileged and powerful. The privileged and powerful immediately took over and made it work for them, to gain greater control and dominance, while avoiding responsibility.

Have read all of it now. I really think there might be enough here for a book. I'm sure Rob Burley has considered that, but perhaps someone could suggest this to him? I'm not on Twix, but presumably he is- if anyone here cares to do this?

“I don’t feel I completely caved,” she says, sounding a little stung. “I really don’t, but I do think that it could have done something more robust. The BBC needed to be better than that.”

And doesn't it say everything that now, the pinnacle of 'the right thing to do', the brave journalistic, balanced, unbiased position is to basically say, very nicely, 'er, there might possibly be a few questions to ask about some of the finer points of the activism we're embracing'.

Not an equally robust consideration and dissection of the views and situation on both sides of the discussion. Not any willingness or courage to actually take an impartial stance. These people speaking out are still at the pinnacle of bravery and exposing themselves merely by saying 'er, might we just think for a second about women and children'.

I think the earlier guy quoted is right. At this point you cannot change a gender ideology captured culture, it does not have the capacity for objectivity. It will always stand in one view point and attempt to drag everything back to itself, because everything that is not wholly controlled is an intolerable threat. It cannot be that 'objectivity' is diluted down to emotionally tolerable levels to benefit activists of 'we need to just be able to hold hands and cope with letting someone else say, briefly, that there might be another way to look at this without total meltdown'. The people currently there and running this need to go. All of them. Starting again, fresh, with very thorough interview and appointment process to weed out and avoid anyone with a history of activism and extreme views, and an inability to cope with objectivity and serving the whole public. Activism and employability really need at this point to start being very closely questioned where public funding and public service is involved.

That's a brilliant if completely infuriating article. It lays out clearly how it happened - the crucial role of Trans media watch right at the beginning, the establishment of the corporate be kind group think backed up by the bullying and intimidation of TRA staff of those guilty of 'wrong think'

yku can also see the the link between university educated young staffers who went through stonewalled academia arriving at the bbc and throwing their weight around which was accepted by the bbc in pursuit of youth viewers. The boring old straight journalists were got rid of or sidelined and the terrifying certainty of people with next to no life experience was seen as far more important. As an aside, When did we as a society decide that the average 22 year old should be listened to and held up as an expert by people old enough to be their parents? You see it all the time with politicians or celebrities "oh I didn't really understand anything about it so I asked my kids and they told me sex wasn't binary and TWAW and so now I understand and am educated"

Thank you again for this @lcakethereforeIam - have finally finished it and it is pretty devastating:

The [internal BBC] report is really interesting because it openly states a position that is rarely committed to paper:

“There was a general feeling that News & Current Affairs output often presents balanced debates on LGBT issues, which were at odds with the BBC’s corporate stance on LGBT inclusion, which seemed to be invisible.”

This line has been described to me by a senior presenter at the BBC as a “smoking gun”. It reveals that these BBC employees were hostile to the journalistic principles of impartiality and balance when it came to debates about LGBT issues. Instead, they believed that the BBC’s corporate position on LGBT inclusion should be promoted and valued over and above “balanced debates”.

Am now trying to decide if I send it to family who are bemused as to why I don’t trust the BBC anymore.

It also underlines the utter fiction that is 'both sides' and 'marginalised'.

Fascinating article - I’ve seen a lot of the individual points made before but having it all brought together really highlights the culture of the BBC over this time. I do also think it should be acknowledged that the BBC have become more impartial on this over the last year or so - albeit more due to outside pressures.

Definitely! I remember reading academic papers and Harvard Business School articles in 2008-2010 that were advocating diversity in business to improve organisational culture, promote innovation and creative thinking. Those articles were very much arguing not only for diversity of background they were arguing for diversity of thought to avoid organisations developing groupthink. I was shocked when I saw the glut of consultants promoting EDI and ignoring this crucial aspect of the theory.

Me too, I thought it was about diversity of thought, as a way to take a new approach to a business problem, like some who might have worked in the transport industry bring what they new from there into the NHS to develop a new approach.
When it all got turned into navel gazing victimology, that's when the UK lost it's competitive edge, and the last opportunity to do better in an ever more completive world, which is why our economy is in the toilet and our productivity is less than zero.

This is the Telegraph's take

https://archive.ph/0U8Vv

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/16/bbc-news-boss-fran-unsworth-driven-out-by-trans-activism/

at least they acknowledge the source.

She pointed out that “until the Supreme Court ruling on it, Keir Starmer himself was saying trans women are women”.

Ahh, the old "well, everyone else was doing it " argument. On second reading, any respect I had for Unsworth diminishes rapidly.

We should have been doing more, but it wasn't our fault.
We knew, but didn't do anything to stop it, but neither did anyone else.
I did what I could, but I didn't do enough, but it was the idealogues' fault, really.

When is anyone in the BBC going to take responsibility for this?

I agree with Ophelia, earlier: they all have to go, for any change to be made. Maybe the new Director General will start by firing people? Google loves doing that!

This is an outstanding article. I hadn't realised quite how early the infiltration and capture started at the BBC.

A great article well worth finding the time to read it. The BBC still does not seem to acknowledge the damage it has done [particularly to children] by the pro-trans stance it has taken over the last 15 years or so. Until it does this it cannot move on and make real changes. I also note that BBC Verify is being wound down and closed. Given the inability of the BBC to determine the truth about who a woman is the Verify team were always on a hiding to nothing.

The fact that NewsWatch and BBC Verify completely failed to do what they purportedly were set up to do, was probably the last straw for me with the BBC. Not only did they never seem to properly address any of the complaints they received, it seemed that they were unable to accept that they should ever get any complaints about anything they were doing. Constantly marking their own homework, and ignoring everyone who was paying their salaries.

Thanks for this

“Nobody, ever, ever said to me as director of news, ‘you need to get points in the Stonewall league table’,” she said. But she acknowledged that “there was a sea in which we all swam… an atmosphere. We need to be kind to transitioning people. It’s a social phenomenon. And I think this ‘be kind’ thing was at the heart of it.”

Someone send this to Allison Bailey!!