UK · Bias: State-funded
UK Government (License fee)
Launched in 1922, the BBC is the world's oldest national broadcaster, and through its World Service it's also the single largest external broadcaster on the planet — reaching an estimated 450 million people a week in more than 40 languages. It's funded by a mandatory license fee every UK household with a TV has to pay, which is either the last honest way to fund serious journalism or a quasi-tax, depending who you ask. Its reputation as journalism's gold standard took a serious hit in 2012, when it emerged that the BBC's own Newsnight program had killed an investigation into TV star Jimmy Savile's decades of sexual abuse just months before he died — only for a rival network to break the story and trigger one of the biggest institutional cover-up scandals in British broadcasting history.
BBC journalist Martin Bashir landed the single biggest interview of his career in 1995 — Princess Diana's Panorama sit-down, where she uttered the immortal line, "there were three of us in this marriage." The motive was pure ambition: this was the interview every journalist on Earth wanted. The method, it turned out, was fraud. A 2021 inquiry led by retired Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson found Bashir had commissioned forged bank statements to convince Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, that Diana's own staff were secretly being paid by intelligence services to spy on her — deceiving Spencer into arranging the meeting that got Bashir access to Diana in the first place. Worse, Dyson found the BBC had known about the deception for decades and covered it up. The Corporation issued formal apologies to Diana's sons William and Harry, her ex-husband Charles, and her brother nearly 26 years after the fact.