Boris Johnson’s special adviser Dominic Cummings has expressed a desire to “whack” the BBC. Nicky Morgan, until recently the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, compared the broadcaster to the defunct video rental chain Blockbuster and has spoken wistfully about the possibility of the BBC moving towards a Netflix-style voluntary subscription funding model. A combination of Johnson’s large majority and widespread disquiet about the BBC’s recent political coverage seemed to open a clear route towards the creation of a radically different, significantly diminished public broadcaster. But we have arrived abruptly in a different era. From our new perspective, adrift in the most significant public health crisis of our age, those days feel suddenly distant. There are new, more urgent questions. Would market forces offer religious services on local radio stations across the country? Or virtual gallery tours and musical and comedy performances? Would Netflix launch extensive additional educational programming to help children unable to attend school to keep up with their studies? Would Amazon dig into its massive archive of sport, arts and drama content to offer prime cuts to a quarantined population? Sign up to the Media Briefing: news for the news-makers Read more The BBC is proposing all this and more – including everything from home exercise classes for older people to dietary advice in a time of potentially scarce supplies. There is a name for such initiatives: public service broadcasting. And we may soon realise how much we missed it if we lost it. The sense of the BBC’s diminishing authority did not arrive from nowhere. Since the turn of the century, it has faced a series of crises: some unfortunate, but many self-created. It fought the government and lost over its reporting of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. The scandal surrounding the suppression of the reporting into Jimmy Savile’s lifetime of child sexual abuse still beggars belief. It had a bad Brexit, gave a voice to climate change deniers in the name of balance and dropped the ball on everything from gender equality in the workplace to its treatment of a presenter who took issue with the language of the US president. It has been running out of people willing to defend it – which is presumably why the government felt able to threaten it in such explicit terms. Fox Business host Trish Regan Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trish Regan, a host on the Fox Business channel, tolder viewers that the coronavirus was ‘yet another attempt to impeach’ Donald Trump. Her show was later put on hiatus ‘until further notice’. Photograph: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images Advertisement But what is needed most during times of crisis is clarity and accountability. The treatment of Donald Trump’s absurdly contradictory and misleading rhetoric around coronavirus should act as a warning to us all. Trump’s cheerleaders at Fox News have walked in lock step with their candidate, shamelessly calibrating their stance according to his position, flip-flopping all over the place as a result. It no longer feels hysterical to suggest that this approach could cost lives – indeed, it may already have done so. It is a graphic illustration of what can happen when leaders know that their media allies will be slavishly loyal. The BBC’s coverage of the political elements of this crisis may still fall short of its wider aims; too often it accepts unquestioningly what the government says. Yet the point remains: if the BBC fails to scrutinise the government, the public, as stakeholders, have a right to hold them to account. Fox News faces no such obligation towards balance and, accordingly, its viewers will remain dangerously ignorant about the extent of their government’s failure. But the BBC is about more than news. It is etched into British lives, even if sometimes only as a pantomime villain. The delays to staples such as EastEnders and Casualty will remind us of that. The pauses to the filming of Line of Duty and Peaky Blinders will affect “event” TV, too. But the coronavirus proposals transcend entertainment. They represent a statement of community values and a practical attempt to help. At its best, the BBC is sustained by a contract between broadcaster and citizen. It’s easy to be cavalier about this sentiment, but suddenly, it feels reassuring. The BBC relies on consent and goodwill to continue as a public service broadcaster. Its enemies have been waiting patiently for that feeling to dwindle and it had begun to look like they were in luck. But, in a time of traumatic change, the BBC could be the one institution that has a chance of staying largely the same.