Just imagine if Nigel Farage or his allies held meaningful influence over the BBC. A broadcaster historically associated with rigorous editorial standards could be transformed into something closer to a partisan outlet, something resembling GB News, but with vastly greater reach and influence.
Some rare good news emerged this week. Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal backed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party to reduce the licence fee that funds the country’s public broadcaster, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC).
The result represents a clear public endorsement of public service broadcasting. It also acts as a message for far-right movements across Europe, which are increasingly targeting national broadcasters.
In many countries these institutions are accused of political bias or of operating with outdated funding models. Yet the real political objective behind many of these campaigns is less about reform and more about weakening independent media institutions.
BBC in the firing line
Nowhere is this debate more intense than in the UK. For years, right-wing politicians, commentators and think tanks have argued that the BBC’s mandatory licence-fee funding model is outdated and unfair. Their criticism frequently centres on alleged political bias, despite the BBC’s longstanding global reputation as one of the most respected public broadcasters in the world.
The BBC is not immune from criticism, of course. No large media institution is. It has long been accused of both left and right-wing bias. Critics on the right point to what they see as liberal, metropolitan values, while critics on the left argue it too often privileges government narratives and establishment voices. Reuters Institute research shows that, overall, the BBC is less trusted by the political right than people on the left.
But the current wave of attacks is part of a broader political strategy aimed at delegitimising public-service media altogether.
Even figures outside the UK have joined the anti-BBC chorus. In November, Donald Trump claimed he had an “obligation” to sue the BBC over the editing of a section of his speech in an episode of Panorama.
The deeper danger is not criticism itself, but what comes next. Across Europe, far-right parties seek not merely to weaken public broadcasters financially but to reshape them politically, either by forcing them into commercial dependence or by bringing them under direct political influence if they gain power.
A playbook spreading across Europe
If such forces were ever able to exert real control over the BBC, the consequences would be profound. The occasional grumble about paying the licence fee would quickly seem trivial compared with the prospect of political interference in one of the world’s most prestigious media institutions.
Just imagine if Nigel Farage or his allies held meaningful influence over the BBC. A broadcaster historically associated with rigorous editorial standards could be transformed into something closer to a partisan outlet, something resembling GB News, but with vastly greater reach and influence.
And Farage’s ideological allies across Europe are pursuing similar strategies, seeking to undermine the independence of public broadcasters in their own countries.
In France, the far-right National Rally has threatened to privatise the country’s public television and radio networks. Ahead of the snap general election in 2024, the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, said his ambition was to privatise public broadcasters “in order to make savings,” adding that they would operate under a set of specifications.
The party’s vice president Sebastien Chénu said that public television and radio needed “a bit of liberty, some oxygen,” while criticising radio programmes he claimed, “lean to the left or far left.”
Similar pressures are emerging elsewhere in Europe. Speaking to the Spanish newspaper El Pais earlier this year, Luis Menéndez, head of the development committee of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), warned that threats to public service media are gaining ground in Poland, Slovakia, Malta and Hungary.
“It’s a wind that brings not only cold, but also waves of disinformation, sinister gusts of espionage, bursts of hybrid-digital warfare, and gales against free journalism and democracy,” Menéndez said, warning that such conditions create fertile ground for far-right political conspiracy theories that target public media.
Hungary’s warning
Hungary offers perhaps has the most depressing and worrying example of how political power can reshape a country’s media landscape. For more than a decade, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has presided over the expansion of a vast pro-government media ecosystem that dominates much of the national conversation.
Péter Magyar, leader of Respect and Freedom (TISZA) party, has described what he sees as the corrosive effects of what he calls Orbán’s “propaganda factory.”
“It might be very difficult to imagine from America or Western Europe what the propaganda and the state machinery is like here,” Magyar said in an interview with the Associated Press. “This parallel reality is like the Truman Show. People believe that it’s reality.”
America’s parallel crisis
Yet such pressures facing independent media are not confined to Central and Eastern Europe, or indeed the wider continent.
The dynamics echo developments in the United States. Budget cuts under Donald Trump have already led to the closure of the US Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the body created in 1967 to support the country’s public radio and television system. After nearly six decades in operation, the non-profit announced earlier this year that it would dissolve following severe federal funding reductions.
Trump and his MAGA allies have long targeted NPR (National Public Radio) and PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), the two main networks supported by the CPB. Plans to eliminate their funding were outlined in the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump administration, Project 2025.
The policy memo said: “For years taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidising [NPR and PBS], which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’.”
Last July, Trump wrote on social media that any Republican who voted against funding cuts “to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or endorsement.”
Announcing the organisation’s dissolution, CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said its “final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organisation to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attack.”
The growing power of media billionaires
The drawing of public broadcasters into wider political battles over information, influence and democratic accountability, comes at a time when ownership of the US media landscape is already highly concentrated in the hands of a small number of billionaires.
The world’s richest man owns X, the family of the second-richest controls Paramount, which owns CBS, the third richest owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the fourth richest owns the Washington Post and Amazon MGM Studios, and another billionaire controls Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
Many of these powerful media barons have, to varying degrees, accommodated the demands of a combative president who has simultaneously stripped public broadcasting of federal support.
As the magazine Prospectobserved in a recent paper on the state of US media: “Increasingly, Americans say they no longer know who or what to believe.”
Why the Swiss vote matters
The picture is uncomfortably familiar in the UK. Here, too, a small group of wealthy owners dominates much of the national newspaper industry. The BBC remains a frequent target of political attack from the right, even as openly partisan broadcasters and new populist news websites enter the market.
Meanwhile Nigel Farage, whose far-right party is gaining ground electorally, has repeatedly pledged to abolish the licence fee and replace it with a subscription model, arguing that the broadcaster is “institutionally biased.”
It’s not difficult to see how fragile and susceptible to manipulation the information environment can become, even in countries that still like to think of themselves as stable western democracies.
Viewers may often be frustrated with aspects of the BBC’s coverage, such as disproportionate attention given to figures like Farage. But abolishing the licence fee could concentrate even greater power in the hands of wealthy private media owners, many of them based outside the UK.
Weakening public broadcasting would also accelerate a shift toward subscription-based media, forcing households to rely on multiple private platforms simply to access news and live television. By contrast, the current licence fee, around £180 a year, funds a wide range of news, cultural programming and entertainment that remains universally available.
Against that backdrop, the Swiss vote takes on wider significance. By rejecting an attempt to weaken the country’s public broadcaster, voters signalled that, when given the choice, citizens may still recognise the value of independent public-service media, and may be willing to defend it.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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