James Harding says it is ‘recklessly complacent’ to assume Trump-style attacks on media could never happen in UK
The BBC must be given complete political independence in case Nigel Farage enters government, its former director of news has said.
James Harding, now the editor-in-chief of the Observer, pointed to Donald Trump’s attempts to defund publicly backed US media and said it would be “recklessly complacent” to believe something similar could not happen in Britain.
He said the BBC’s survival was at stake and noted that Reform’s last manifesto had claimed the “out-of-touch wasteful BBC is institutionally biased. The TV licence is taxation without representation. We will scrap it.”
Harding said: “In other words, the one-time reality TV star who leads Reform has some bracing reality in store for TV. It’s recklessly complacent to ignore it. What’s happened in the US is, as likely as not, going to happen here. We have to address this now.”
