What’s that coming over the hill?
Opinion
What does 2026 have in store for the BBC, Trump and the tech giants? Ray Snoddy offers his forecast.
Never mind New Year’s resolutions, this is a year when at least some important media issues could be resolved, or at the very least, matters could become much clearer.
The most obvious is that President Donald J. Trump’s multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the BBC will fail to make the grade.
There is a widespread legal view that the Florida Court will find it has no jurisdiction over the case as it would be impossible to find any honest American who had either seen or could conceivably have been influenced by a careless edit in an edition of Panorama shown in October 2024.
Should matters of substance ever get to court, the BBC could get great help from the recently released evidence of former special counsel and attorney Jack Smith that the substance of the Panorama take on Trump’s involvement with the January 6th 2021, assault on the US Capitol was actually true in the broadest sense.
As Smith argued in his deposition on the affair: “there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the President of the United States “ committed crimes” to overturn the results of an American election and to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
It is unlikely that Trump would want to see such comments used in court by a source who has never lost a prosecution.
A new BBC broom
Next up, we will have a new BBC director-general, surely a reinstated deputy director-general role, and a new chief executive of BBC News. Such appointments could scarcely be more critical if the BBC is to restore its reputation for, not just impartiality, but more importantly, the validity of its news offering and public purpose.
As editor-in-chief, the person running the BBC must have a journalistic sensibility, or failing that, can call on the judgements of a powerful deputy to try to avoid at least some of the embarrassing errors of the past.
But leaving aside the obvious quality of BBC Radio News and the World Service, there is an urgent need to rebuild television news from the ground up, moving away from the undue reliance on vacuous “breaking news” and recreating some of the analytical expertise so casually cast aside by the previous regime.
This is also the year when the BBC will somehow have to regain some of its journalistic courage – a quality now more likely to be found at Channel 4 than at the Corporation.
Some resolution should have flown from the Government’s Green Paper on the future funding of the BBC, but alas, the wretched document has provided little. Advertising on BBC services has been suggested generation after generation despite the obvious problem that it would undermine the finances of ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Yet there it is still there. Can you be serious?
The idea of concessions for those on social security is long overdue, but the proposed two-tier licence fee system undermines this.
Is a Labour Government really proposing that only those who can pay an extra subscription can get access to the most popular or best programmes? The Government should be ashamed of itself.
Instead of a universal service, there is the Balkanisation of the BBC and the danger of an inevitable slide over time towards the near irrelevance of an American PBS system.
And all of this justified by that most slippery of all arguments – “there is a sense among some audiences that the licence fee has become outdated.” Not proof, not evidence, not argument, but “a sense.”
If you want a universal service- and that should be the aim of a Labour Government- then only the method of collection is outdated. All households pay for education, the arts, museums, and science, and should pay too for a universal public broadcasting service, ever more critical in an age of increasingly greedy international media oligarchs with their own agendas who do not believe in paying taxes.
Culture secretary Lisa Nandy is better than this and surely does not want to go down in history as the person responsible for initiating the gradual destruction of the BBC after a century of service.
Cracking the AI code and tackling tech
We should get more sense, if not resolution, on the role AI plays in the media and journalism – benign, helpful assistant or dominatrix?
An agreed code must be developed that makes clear to readers whether AI merely helped with researching the news or wrote the whole thing, as it is now common to acknowledge sponsored copy.
There should also be a resolve, if not a resolution, to tackle the leading tech giants, publishers in all but name, who have almost all aligned themselves in the cause of self-interest and the madness of Trump.
Increasingly, they are extending their reach into TV networks and newspapers and conniving in a world where Trump can threaten to sue reporters who ask questions he does not like.
The problem goes far beyond the media and legislation aimed at preventing active harm caused by the social media giants. At its heart lies the question of accelerating financial dominance, accompanied by an unwillingness to contribute to society by paying anything like their fair share of taxes or adequately compensating traditional media organisations for the damage they have suffered
Action to tackle such egregious disparities of wealth will have to be taken internationally. Still, there is no reason the first steps should not be taken this year in the US, following the mid-term elections, when Trump will almost certainly lose control of Congress.
Despite appearances to the contrary, there is a slight chance of an optimistic resolution this year for the media and the world order as a whole. It rests on an American President, who illegally attacked Venezuela and who is threatening everywhere from Greenland and Mexico to Colombia and Cuba, being removed under the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution as being no longer fit for office. It would require little more than the release of his medical records.
That would, of course, unleash President JD Vance into the world, but some problems are so intense that little can be done about them until 2027 at the earliest.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.