PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, writes about the latest scandal to engulf the BBC. "This latest disaster for the BBC might - just might - be a catalyst to bring about real change."

For those of us who believe that the BBC licence fee should have been scrapped years ago, the latest crisis to engulf the corporation is hard not to enjoy.

Sure, it's never nice to see people lose their jobs and the confected Panorama clip of Donald Trump is something of an embarrassment for the nation as a whole,  not just a black mark for the BBC.

Nevertheless, sometimes things need to get worse before they get better. This latest disaster for the BBC might - just might - be a catalyst to bring about real change.

What makes this scandal much worse than so many other recent examples of BBC bias is how it can't be explained away as an error or an unfortunate oversight. You can't splice together different parts of a speech and give them a wholly new meaning by accident. It's not sloppy, unlucky or careless - it's a deliberate editorial decision.

I don't think the BBC's current line that the Panorama fiasco constitutes an "error" or a "mistake" is going to be tenable for long - especially if President Trump presses ahead with legal action, which he seems wholly committed to. They will surely have to concede that the splicing of the footage was quite deliberate.

The long-term impact of the Panorama fiasco on the BBC is devastating. I have long been immune to the corporation's claims that it is impartial and balanced. This isn't typically due to a cabal actively conspiring - but rather down to a leftist group think that runs throughout the corporation. The BBC's commitment to diversity doesn't appear to include much diversity of thought. It will find it near impossible to make the claim that it is politically impartial or balanced for years to come.

The fury of the Trump administration could well lead to the BBC losing its access to White House press briefings. I've even heard it suggested that they may lose their licence to broadcast in the USA in much the same way that Iranian Press TV and Russia Today have been taken off air there. And on a similar basis - that they can't be trusted to tell the truth.

To me, however, the most surprising aspect of this whole saga has been the extent to which many journalists outside of the BBC seem unable or unwilling to accept that the broadcaster has done very much wrong.

I found an interview I did earlier this week with Stephen Sackur on Times Radio quite extraordinary. He put to me that the programme wouldn't have changed anyone's view of Trump and, he implied, Trump was essentially responsible for the January 6th rioting.

This wholly misses the point. The question here isn't what's true but whether evidence was manufactured to try and prove something. The equivalent would be a police officer planting evidence at a crime scene to secure a conviction of someone they feel sure is guilty. That would not, to put it mildly, constitute ethical policing and Panorama's tampering with the Trump footage is not ethical journalism either.

If defenders of the BBC in the wider blob continue to try and make the case that there's "nothing to see" here because the underlying truth is that Trump bears some responsibility for January 6th, they won't be extracting the BBC from a deep hole - instead, they'll be digging its grave.

Let's hope the consequence of this latest BBC disaster is to kill off the licence fee and move to some sort of voluntary subscription model.

Way back in the day, there was some sort of economic justification for a television licence fee. Television broadcasting used to have the features of a "public good". This is defined as a commodity or service which is both "non-excludable" and "non-rivalrous". The classic textbook example is a lighthouse - you can't beam the light to some ships and not others in the same area ("non-excludable") and the fact that one ship benefits from receiving light does not diminish the amount of light enjoyed by other ships ("non-rivalrous"). This makes it very difficult to charge for lighthouses through the usual price mechanism - if you don't pay you can't be denied the benefit.

A compulsory licence fee for television broadcasting was in large part justified by the fact that if you were beaming images into No 6 Acacia Avenue, there was no way that you could stop the people at No 7 putting up an aerial and receiving the same service. Technology has changed all this. We now receive TV through cable or satellite and we can choose which sports channels or other subscription services we receive. If you don't pay for Sky Sports, Netflix or Apple+, you don't get to watch them in your own home. The BBC should now compete on the same terms.

We were always eventually going to get to the point where the licence fee could no longer be remotely justified. Let's hope the BBC's mistreatment of President Trump and his reaction to it hastens the arrival of that day.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!