November 18, 2025

The highest standards of public service journalism are the best response to the BBC’s critics 

The people who are really angry at the BBC right now are keen to remind us that Panorama is the BBC’s ‘flagship’ current affairs programme. The implication being that if this is the BBC at its best then it’s also the tip of the iceberg of biased reporting. I take a different view. When I was studying journalism back in the 80s, many of my class dreamed of working on the programme, associated with our heroes like John Pilger and David Dimbelby. Back then this iconic name was associated with decades of original investigations, breaking important stories that made a difference. But with some honourable exceptions, Panorama has been a bit rubbish for a long time, at least when it comes to sciency subjects that I care about. Back in 2004 my husband, a politics teacher, got a letter published in the Guardian after heavy lobbying from his sixth form students who had taken issue with reports that Panorama was to be cut from an hour to 30 minutes and made less “distant, demanding and didactic” to appeal to their age group. On reflection I wonder if that’s where the rot started. I’m also not sure the problems I have with some Panoramas stem from much lamented ‘institutional bias’. I think it just too often falls short of the standards applied to news and current affairs across the rest of the network.

I especially remember the Panoramas that involved experts I work with as boss of the Science Media Centre, set up after media frenzies on MMR and GM crops. I know of senior press officers at top UK universities who are reluctant to work with the programme and several good scientists who are still traumatised by memories of involvement. One on anti-depressants in 2023 had interviewed several top psychiatrists at length in what they were assured would be a balanced look at the pros and cons.  Instead they were forced to watch from behind cushions as the programme focussed almost entirely on patients who have suffered serious side effects and experts with a long track record of campaigning against the overuse of the drugs. An earlier one on antidepressants included shaky undercover footage of leading scientists Professor David Nutt from Imperial and Guy Goodwin from Oxford speaking at two scientific meetings. In the official complaint they lodged afterwards, these two respected and media-friendly scientists noted that they would have happily agreed to be filmed had they been asked. A film on Sellafield’s safety failings, in which a high profile whistle blower and disgruntled former managers warned that a serious nuclear accidence was likely, ended with an interview with the CEO of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority insisting the side remains safe. And there was the one on Mohamed Taranissi, the UK’s most successful IVF doctor, which included edited footage from undercover reporters posing as patients that cost the BBC millions to settle. In 2023 the SMC filed our first ever official complaint against a BBC programme. ‘A Recipe for Ill-Health?’ a Panorama on Ultra-Processed Food took a sensational and scare-mongering approach to this important subject, focussing on claims that UPF are causing rising levels of cancer, diabetes, and stroke. Our complaint reached the highest level of the BBC’s process but was not upheld. The letter explained that while some of our criticisms were valid, the BBC is justified to make programmes which focus primarily on possible risks.

None of this makes me a critic of the BBC.  The opposite is the case. I am a fanatical defender and desperately want it to survive and thrive. If there is something good that could come out of the latest crisis it is that we could look again at what good public service news and current affairs looks like.

To find it in science we need look no further than the excellent science, health, environment, and tech journalists who report news across the Beeb as well as making specialist programmes like Inside Health, Rare Earth, Horizon, and All in the Mind.  It is no coincidence that the really good science Panoramas in recent years have been made by these journalists. One that stood out was Tom Heap’s ‘What’s Up with the Weather?’ an honest investigation into what we really know and don’t know about climate change, made in the febrile aftermath of the ‘climate-gate’ crisis. Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s Medical Editor, has made around a dozen brilliant Panoramas on everything from Alzheimer’s to genome editing, to the making of the Covid vaccines, earning him the Medical Journalist Associations’ ‘Outstanding Contribution to Medical Journalism Award’ twice. His reporting on assisted dying has been praised by both sides of this passionate debate, and I have no idea what he thinks. There’s impartiality for you! 

One of the things that has irritated me in the debate on the BBC  has been commentators scoffing at the idea of the BBC being a trusted brand. This is a fact not an opinion and is a phenomenal achievement in these times of fragmentation and polarisation. Keeping and continuing to earn public trust is the holy grail for all news organisations desperately trying to stem the tide of audiences to social media. I’m convinced that the BBC can do that by sticking with the very best qualities of journalism, making high quality programmes that people turn to because they feel the need for credible, impartial, and accurate information; investigations that scare and anger us, not by dint of cherry-picking evidence and guests, but because an open-ended investigation found compelling evidence to do so; and programmes led by journalists with a track record of reporting the issues, who have come to know which experts are trustworthy and credible. Many of the young news avoiders that the BBC was pursuing by making Panorama shorter and more entertaining are now suggesting they crave objective and impartial reporting and I’m certainly not the first to question why an organisation like the BBC would try to emulate what’s on social media rather than doubling down on the quality and standards that are its USP.

Animal testing, our food system, how we treat mental illness – the complexities and nuances in all those debates are exactly what make them interesting.  A programme that really gets into the detail and commands attention is harder to make than your average schlock. But the BBC has a proud history of exactly that. Fearless attention to detail, buttressed by hard evidence, is the recipe for impartial programmes. The BBC’s best response to its critics would be to make more of them.

This blog contains the thoughts of the author rather than representing the work or policy of the Science Media Centre.

• Amended on 26/11/2025

The passage in the original version of this blog relating to a Panorama about the risk of a nuclear accident has been amended after representations by the programme’s producer.  I am happy to make clear that there was a single whistle-blower in this case, and that the interviewee insisting the site was safe was from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and not the UK’s nuclear regulator.