The British Broadcasting Corporation is Britain's public broadcaster, founded a century ago by John Reith, whose austere vision laid out its mission "to inform, educate and entertain". The BBC is colloquially known as "Auntie". Britons spend more time with it than with any other media outlet.
The BBC is funded by a licence fee levied on any household that watches live television on any channel, which in practice means nearly everyone. Some elderly viewers get an exemption. In 2025 the fee is £174.50 ($230)—enough to subscribe to the basic plans of both Netflix and Disney+ and still have £30 left over for popcorn. Britons have no easy way to opt out of paying for the BBC. The requirement to serve the whole country has always been challenging.
The BBC remains among Britain's most trusted news brands. Yet trust varies sharply by political leaning: 67% of self-described left-wingers and 67% of centrists say they trust BBC News, but only 47% of right-wingers do, according to the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. The BBC is the world's most trusted international news brand, according to a 2025 survey across 18 countries by Tapestry Research.
Producing news to suit the varied taste of a whole country—as well as a growing international audience—is tricky work. For most of the 20th century, social class was the main determinant of voting behaviour, and the middle-class employees of the BBC were well placed to produce middle-of-the-road content. In recent years class has been replaced by age as the main political dividing line. Polls by YouGov show that Reform UK, the insurgent right-wing party, is backed by 35% of over-65s but only 8% of 18- to 24-year-olds. In London Reform is on 15%, half its level of support in any other English region. For a London-based news organisation, 70% of whose staff are under 50, it has never been harder to keep in touch politically.
The BBC's directors-general are periodically jettisoned to gleeful headlines. Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher both fought bitter battles with the broadcaster. Nigel Farage has said the BBC is on its "last chance". Kemi Badenoch of the Conservatives has said it should not receive a licence fee unless it can be truly impartial. The Liberal Democrats, though noisy defenders of the BBC, have complained that it treats them unfairly.
Under Boris Johnson, Downing Street advisers let it be known that they were planning to "whack" the BBC. They appointed more conservatives to its board and to Ofcom's leadership, and reined in its funding, but the broadcaster marched doggedly on—helped by the covid-19 pandemic, during which it made itself useful disseminating health information and remote education.
On November 9th 2025 Tim Davie, the BBC's director-general for five years, resigned along with Deborah Turness, his head of news, over a documentary about Donald Trump. The programme, made by an independent production company and aired under the BBC's "Panorama" brand, featured footage from January 6th 2021 in which Mr Trump appeared to say incendiary words that had in fact been stitched together from two unrelated remarks. After the Telegraph published a memo from a BBC whistleblower on November 3rd, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the BBC "100% fake news". Mr Trump claimed victory and threatened to sue. The resignation followed a run of editorial missteps, including a breach of rules over a Gaza documentary narrated by the son of a Hamas official and the broadcasting of chants of "Death to the IDF" at Glastonbury.
John Birt served as director-general in the 1990s. Mark Tully, the BBC's Delhi bureau chief for more than 20 years, left in 1994 after accusing Birt of ruling the corporation as a monolith. Tully's commentary reached 50m listeners across six languages and was widely trusted in India at a time when All-India Radio reported only what the government wanted.
The BBC is one of the world's biggest sources of original reporting. On Facebook the five most-followed news pages are run by Chinese outlets; the BBC's page is sixth. Its foreign-language services are a source of soft power for Britain and a standard-bearer for liberal values.
The BBC is the world's biggest commissioner of new children's programming. Everything from "Hey Duggee" to "Bluey" has been backed with BBC money. CBeebies, its service for toddlers, was launched in 2002, when the BBC spent 4% of its income on children's content; by 2025 it manages barely 2%. In 2025 the BBC alone commissioned 57 kids' shows, while Netflix and Disney+ between them commissioned 64—less than half as many as they managed in 2021.
"Bluey", about a little blue dog, was backed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial arm. Disney+ now pays to broadcast it. "Hey Duggee", made by Studio AKA, had no pedigree in children's television when the BBC backed it in 2015; an episode takes seven minutes to watch and about five months to make. The show has been translated into dozens of languages and hit a billion views in China within a year.
BBC iPlayer delivers about 9bn streams a year in total. "Numberblocks", a cartoon about maths shown on both the BBC and YouTube, achieved similar figures on YouTube alone. When rules limited how much advertisers could track under-13s, YouTube revenue for children's content dropped by as much as 80%, making the BBC essential for funding anything beyond the cheapest content.
BBC Studios, which sells programmes and merchandising rights around the world, has revenues of £2.2bn a year.
The voters who complain most about the BBC are in fact the ones who watch it the most. Over-65s may plan to vote for the anti-BBC Mr Farage, but this age group spends an average of more than five hours a day watching television, according to Ofcom. Criticising the BBC is enormously popular for politicians; actually doing away with it could be very unpopular indeed.
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