The ex-tech executive once defended his silicon valley employer’s underpayment of tax in the UK
Matt Brittin speaks during the Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, November 7, 2018 © Getty Images; Pedro Fiuza
[RT] The
BBC has announced the appointment of former Google executive Matt
Brittin as its new director-general, placing the UK’s state media outlet
in the hands of a tech businessman with no media experience.
In a
statement on Wednesday, BBC chairman Samir Shah said Brittin will take
over the reins at the broadcaster in May, six months after outgoing
director-general Tim Davie announced his resignation.
Brittin, who worked as Google’s EMEA president from 2014 to 2024, was chosen for his “deep experience of leading a high-profile and highly-complex organisation through transformation,” Shah said.
Brittin’s
appointment comes at a nadir for the BBC. The broadcaster is facing a
$10 billion lawsuit from US President Donald Trump over a documentary
that deceptively edited a speech he gave before his supporters rioted at
the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. During Davie’s five-year tenure, the
BBC has slashed its budget by 10%, been accused of both pro- and
anti-Israel bias, had one of its anchors sentenced for child sex crimes,
and struggled to keep its government-backed World Service outlets open.
In a speech to parliament in 2024, Davie declared that the BBC was losing the “cognitive war” to “RT and other Chinese services.”
The politics-media-tech revolving door
Brittin
is the first ever BBC chief without any prior experience in newspaper
or broadcast media, save for joining the board of The Guardian last
year. His appointment represents the continued consolidation of big
tech, politics, and media across the Western world: Apart from their own
algorithms controlling the reach of legacy media outlets and de-facto
dictating what they can and cannot say via content guidelines, tech
billionaires have bought up a number of struggling media outlets in
recent years.
Amazon purchased the Washington Post for $250
million in 2013. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and his son David have
acquired CBS parent company Paramount and have made a bid for Warner
Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN and HBO. Other tycoons have chosen to
found their own media outlets. Among them are The Republic and Arena
magazine, launched by defense contractor Palantir and venture capitalist
Max Meyer respectively.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley corporations have taken in media bosses who
once criticized them, and politicians once tasked with regulating them.
Journalist and former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg joined Meta
in 2018, going on to lead the company’s Global Affairs department from
2022 to 2025. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne joined
OpenAI last year, while former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak now advises
Microsoft and Anthropic, whose Claude AI is currently used by the
Pentagon to assess potential targets for military strikes.
As of
last April, at least 36 British officials who worked for technology
regulators had gone on to work for the companies they regulated,
according to an investigation by BBC Radio 4.
Whoever Brittin
names as CEO of BBC News will ultimately decide whether an investigation
would go ahead in future. Brittin’s choice of news chief will also
shape the BBC’s editorial tone on issues such as Google’s contribution
to Britain’s revenues. Grilled by lawmakers in 2012 and 2014 over the
firm’s alleged underpayment of tax in the UK, Brittin eventually
negotiated a deal with the British government that saw Google pay £130
million ($173 million) in back taxes.
Critics argued that this sum
represented a fraction of what Google actually owed, with Labour MP
John McDonnell claiming that the firm struck a “sweetheart deal” with the government.