British Broadcasting Capitulation: BBC bosses fall

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Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have been detained as prisoners of war by Russia. Many of those released say beating and torture are routine. Our correspondent hears the painful testimony of two recent inmates. And Cantor Sherpa was 19 when he was hired as a porter on Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's expedition to ascend Everest in 1953. Though he worked in its vicinity most of his life, he never quite reached the summit. Our obituaries editor remembers him. First up, though.

at the BBC. Last night, the Director-General Tim Davey and its Chief of News Deborah Ternus resigned. The trigger? A leaked memo criticizing a documentary for editing a Donald Trump speech in order to mislead viewers. It's the latest in a string of controversies at the broadcaster over allegations of bias.

Trump has welcomed the resignations, but trouble at the top reveals a far deeper crisis at one of Britain's best-known institutions. I think for the head of the BBC, this was really the last straw. Tom Wainwright is The Economist's media editor. It comes after a series of controversies with their news coverage. And I think the whole thing really highlights the difficult role.

that the BBC has to play and has always had to play in the media landscape here in the UK. So, Tom, let's break down what happened. We've had high-level resignations after a leaked memo. What was in that memo? Well, this memo was about a documentary which aired on the BBC actually last year, and it was a documentary all about Donald Trump. And the controversy concerns...

Two bits of the speech that Donald Trump made on 6th of January 2021 that were edited together. This is the clip straight from Donald Trump's speech. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And this is how it appeared in the documentary. We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.

Now, he did say those words, but those two sections were edited together, and they'd actually been more than 50 minutes apart in his original speech, and people quite reasonably said that this was not a fair way to edit the speech. And this memo, which was written by a former independent advisor to the BBC, complained that actually this wasn't a unique case and that the BBC was having problems with institutional bias and basic journalistic mistakes. in various aspects of its coverage.

... ... ... ... gender rights and other of these subjects, which is highly controversial. And certainly this former advisor said that he felt what he called despair in action by the BBC when it comes to tackling these issues. How has the White House responded to the toppling of heads?

They've been crowing all about it. They seem delighted. First of all, the press secretary posted a couple of photos on X and then Donald Trump himself weighed in. He's posted on Truth Social thanking the Telegraph newspaper, which published this leaked memo for exposing corrupt journalists.

But it's not just in America, actually, that there's been reaction. Here in the UK, Nigel Farage, who's the leader of Reform, which is the party doing best in the polls at the moment, said these resignations marks the last chance for the BBC. And Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, has called for top-to-bottom reform of the BBC. So there's a lot of criticism here, and it's not just on the right. Lots of supporters of the BBC are saying that it should have acted faster.

and should have done more, really, to change before this crisis happened.

Tom, you talked about the difficult role the BBC has to play, but outside the UK, particularly the BBC, for many, is held in such high esteem. Why is it the target of so much scrutiny? It's a really interesting case, and I think it comes down to the unique way that the BBC is funded. It's funded by this thing called the licence fee, which is a kind of pseudo-tax, really, on nearly every household in the UK.

And because of the fact that everybody in the UK more or less has to pay for the BBC, the BBC has an obligation to produce coverage which reflects the UK and which keeps... more or less everybody happy. And of course, the difficulty is when you're trying to keep everybody happy, you very often end up making no one all that happy. Everybody has some criticism of the BBC. It seems sometimes half the UK think it's too right wing, half the UK think it's too left wing.

And this has always been the case ever since the BBC was founded more than 100 years ago. But I think the problem has become more acute in recent years because we've seen this worldwide trend in the news media. landscape, which has seen news organizations rely less on advertising and more on subscriptions. And the upshot of that is that they have become more opinionated on the whole because they're striving to please the subscribers on whom they rely for all of their funding.

And so in a world where news media in general has become more opinionated, the BBC is finding it harder than ever to produce coverage which people like, which is popular, which gets watched, but which at the same time fulfills this role of keeping... everybody happy from left to right. So how damaging is this to the BBC's reputation? I think it's pretty bad. And I think an interesting aspect of this is the way that it has become so internationalised.

Here in the UK, we're pretty used to scandals where somebody says that the BBC said something outrageous about, I mean, Brexit was a classic one where it seemed that half the time they were saying something that angered somebody or other. This one has hit the White House already. And I think that...

The BBC are going to be a little concerned about that because in the US, I feel the BBC has something of an advantage being a foreign news media organisation. Domestic news media in the US have become so polarised, it seems that... news organisations there have become divided into pro or anti-Trump. And so one of the advantages, arguably, that the BBC has had as a foreign news organisation is that it has a chance to rise above that.

That ambition now, I think, has been shot down. Now that you have the presidents of the United States crowing about toppling the head of the BBC. it will now immediately be liberal coded in the minds of many American viewers who perhaps previously hoped would see the BBC as being more neutral than that. So what happens next? Well...

The immediate crisis for the BBC is finding a new boss, and that's going to be difficult, always is controversial, always hard to find someone who everybody is happy with. That process will start now. But I think we should bear in mind that this is not the first time by any means that the BBC has been in this position. We were saying earlier that various political leaders here are calling for change.

is nothing new. Everybody from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher has called for change at the BBC and they have tended not to get the kind of change that they want. During the Brexit years, the Conservatives said privately that they would whack the BBC using kind of... mafia language and it didn't happen. One reason is that the main supporters of the political parties here, which are most critical of the BBC,

tend to actually be the super consumers of BBC content. They tend to be older viewers who watch hours and hours of broadcast TV news. And so when anybody actually comes up with a proposal to drastically cut back on the BBC... Some of those people who criticize it most actually are very loath to see it become a smaller thing than it currently is.

I think that it may end up changing less than some people expect. It's always been a lightning rod and I think always will be. Tom, thank you very much. Thank you. You know, we spend a lot of time here separating fact from claim. And when it comes to mobile networks, that distinction matters. When AT&T makes a claim, it's one you can count on.

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In the early weeks of the war in 2022, Russian tanks rolled through the streets of Kherson in southern Ukraine. It was the first city to be occupied. When there were protests by Ukrainian residents, they were brutally suppressed. Soldiers, city workers and politicians were detained. Though Kherson was liberated some months later, many of its citizens remained imprisoned in Russian-held territory. They included the city's former mayor.

Vladimir Mikhailenko has already retired when Russia occupied the city. Anna Reid writes about Ukraine for The Economist, and some of the testimony she's about to describe includes references to physical and sexual violence. And he stood out against the Russian occupation. You know, he supported the flying of the Ukrainian flag. They tried to use him in Russian propaganda. He refused to cooperate and he was swiftly detained alongside lots of other.

Prominent people, local civil servants, local political figures, NGO heads, journalists, teachers and so on. Anybody of any prominence basically is detained in Russian-occupied territory and he was one of the first. And what do you know about his time in detention? He spent over three years in detention and he was let out at the Having spent a month in rehabilitation, he's now giving interviews from his hospital bed. You can't negotiate with evil, he's told us, and Russia is evil.

So you met him? We did, yes. We met him in hospital. He's 65 now and he looks at least 80. He's extremely frail. Mobile, but walks tentatively, very carefully and still excruciatingly thin. And how was he treated in detention? He was treated with consistent... brutality throughout. He suffered, well, first of all, starvation. He describes...

beatings three times a day, with fists and feet, but also with batons and pipes. He described... a particular sadistic guard who made prisoners put their hands flat up against the wall and beat their fingers till they broke. He asked him once, why are you doing this? And as an answer, he got a beating on the head.

All these things, it's part of what the UN calls systematic and widespread torture and ill treatment, which is meted out to all detainees, whether POWs or civilian detainees held by Russia. And this is an absolutely... set pattern reported by almost everybody and across the prison system and since the beginning of the war and ongoing. There's no distinction between the civilians and the military, young, old, though actually a soldier we interviewed, a released POW, young lieutenant.

He talked about how the more senior officers do get the worst treatment and also even more brutal treatment when Ukraine is on the offensive. But what's happening now is that detainees are being spread out throughout the Russian prison system. So the UN has been tracking this, often using geolocation. They're able to work out, you know, official and unofficial places of detention. And there are over 100 of them now, 70 plus of them inside Russia itself, rather than on occupied territory.

And our interviews and the UN reports on this show that when somebody's moved to a new place which has not held POWs before, the first batch of POWs are practiced on. Our young lieutenant, he told us this. He said that he was moved to a town called Kizel. just west of the Urals. And he said they obviously hadn't had POWs there before, and they were used like toys. This was his phrase. They wanted to see just what they could do with us.

Absolutely terrifying. Anna, you mentioned a young lieutenant. What happened to him? So Jan Danilko, he's a member of something called the Azov Corps, which is one of the most prestigious units within the Ukrainian army. He too was captured early in 2022 when the last defenders of Azov Stalin, Mariupol, surrendered.

She was released earlier this year. He described the standard methods of torture. He talked about sexualised violence, which again is extremely widespread. And that ranges from rape to... electric shocks to the genitals, to beatings while naked, to forced nudity, to sexual humiliation and sexual threats.

Stress positions are very common. So being made to stand all day, being made to kneel on asphalt all day, or made just to sit upright without leaning back on anything all day becomes absolute agony and are all officially tortured.

But then he described what he called, sort of half-jokingly, they're more creative methods of torture. And he talked about something called the motorcycle, which involved being handcuffed and having your legs threaded through your arms and being hung upside down from a playground bar.

exercise yard, and another one called the starfish, which means being sort of spread out with hands and feet tied and beaten. But what's happening now is that the Azov Corps has been designated by Russia a terrorist organization. quite unfairly. And as such, Azov men, over 100 of them already, are being prosecuted by Russia as terrorists and having their POW status removed, being treated like criminals.

and being handed sentences of 10, 20 years or more. They're no longer, in theory at least, eligible for prisoner swaps and face spending the rest of their lives in prison. I mean, it's extraordinary what's going on in the Russian prison system.

This may be a naive question, but what is the Russian state really trying to achieve? One specific goal it has in mind is to force people to cooperate with Russian propaganda. So soldiers are... tortured into signing confessions that, for example, it was the Ukrainian army that was bombing civilian tower blocks in Mariupol and killed perhaps up to 20,000 civilians in Mariupol in 2022.

In the mayor's case, he was asked to become the official Russian governor, inverted commas, of Kherson Oblast, of his old region. I think they also want to... damage morale within Ukraine by upping the fear and anxiety felt by prisoners' families to the maximum. And that certainly is working because people know that they're...

husbands, sons, brothers, fathers are being tortured. And it's absolutely paralyzing for the families. Anna, these two brave men have spoken to you and many others have spoken. Is there any prospect of this treatment ending or of Russia changing its response to the detainees? I don't think there's any prospect of that, no.

They were both speaking because they hoped it would make a difference in the West. It would help bolster the West's understanding of the whole conflict. Neither of them had any hope that this would make any difference. to Russia's treatment of its prisoners, because Russia is obviously immune to shame. But both hope that it basically helps bolster the West's support for Ukraine.

Anna, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you very much for having me on. And for more on the war in Ukraine, do check out tomorrow's episode of Economist Insider, a new video offering. When Shashank Joshi, our defense editor, will be interviewing a former British defense attache to Moscow and Kyiv to ask, how strong is the Russian army? You'll need to be a subscriber to watch.

When Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing reached the summit of Everest on May the 29th, 1953, Katja Sherpa was waiting at a camp lower down. is The Economist's obituaries editor. He had to wait until the two men came down in their jubilant mood to hear what had happened. But he was in the camp because he was a porter. He was one of only three who'd been picked to go this high because he was able to withstand the altitude 27,000 feet without supplementary oxygen.

And he was also the person who had to carry a lot of the stuff needed for the last attempt at the peak. He had to carry ropes, mattresses, sleeping bags. This had been his job. throughout the expedition. He not only had to carry all this stuff, but also he was acting as a guide. He had to help to lay a path up the mountain. and to build bridges. The biggest challenge that they met really on the whole climb was when they came to a huge crevasse that they couldn't get over.

What he had to do then was hike back to his village, which was right at the foot of the mountain, quite away from the base camp. And there he and nine other Sherpas had to cut down. tall trees and take them back to build a bridge across the crevasse. They didn't carry aluminium ladders in those days and to lash...

Three trees together with ropes was the only way he could think of getting over. The reason he and a lot of the other Sherpas were so eager was because Namche Bazaar and the surrounding villages had very little work for anyone. The people there mostly just grew potatoes and herded yaks. They had nothing else that would bring them in money. But...

He, like everyone else, noticed that some people in the nearby villages seemed to be able to get better clothes and had money in their pockets. He discovered it was because they acted as guides on the mountains.

The only problem with this was that he was steeped in the idea that Everest was a holy mountain. He had heard that from the older folk. And he was bothered. about setting foot on it. He and the other Sherpas were all very careful to say the Puja, which is a Buddhist commitment to all creatures and to the earth. before they climbed the mountain. He was sure to climb with respect. He found as he went up that he was really dazzled by the beauty of Everest.

and how many glaciers he could see from the top. He called it the most incredible experience. But that path that he had laid up the mountain, was also going to bring hundreds of people up to the peak. He had opened the door to the world finding Everest, and this was very troubling to him. especially when he saw the effect it had on the mountain. People now didn't seem to bring their rubbish down with them at all. They left tents up there, sleeping bags, plastic bags, food wrappings.

cigarette butts and even their own filth. And by doing this, they were, as he put it, filthying the goddess. He could not bear to see them doing it. But on the other hand, because the argument went back and forth all the time, Everest was now bringing tremendous prosperity to his village. It was suddenly full of shops selling climbing gear and...

Internet cafes and hotels and lodges. And what would happen, he wondered, if the tourists actually stopped coming? Everyone would just grow potatoes and sit around doing nothing as they had before. As it was, he himself ran a hotel, and there he welcomed the tourists and liked to chat to them. At the same time, he tried to appease the mountain.

And while he chatted to the tourists, he would spin his prayer wheel or finger his prayer beads. When he walked round the village and looked at all these extraordinary shops and the crowds there, He would continue to pray and he would go to the monastery to pray that all the trekkers and mountaineers, who were often not well trained on mountains, would be safe. He worked for a long time at high altitude, actually helping the trekkers and mountaineers himself. He worked there for two decades.

until his wife, after a particularly savage avalanche, begged him to stop. And then he helped the tourists and visitors at lower levels. But in all his time, he never did manage to reach the summit of Everest himself. He got as far as 27,000 feet. The problem was that permits to reach the summit were very expensive.

for sherpas like him he tried seven times to get a permit though and it was always refused perhaps in the end it was just as well that he had not outraged the goddess by setting foot on that peak. that's it for this episode of the intelligence see you back here tomorrow Think of your commute, your train ride, your drive, maybe your walk. Even if you don't realize it, crypto and blockchain innovations are all around you on your way into the office. So why not learn about them?

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