The BBC presenter who revealed how the BBC’s decision to cut her job as a reporter was the result of “political pressure” is being hailed as a hero for the first time in decades.
Bethan Williams has been the BBC World Service’s anchor since 2005.
But her story is far from the only one of a BBC reporter being pressured for their work.
In a series of tweets on Thursday, Williams told the world that in the years since her BBC job ended, her boss at the broadcaster, James Harding, “wanted to get rid of me, I refused”.
Williams told the BBC that she “couldn’t work as a journalist anymore” because she was under the threat of “unfair dismissal”.
Williams said that she was also “told to stay silent, but I didn’t”.
Williams, now in her late 60s, is a senior reporter at the BBC in London and is one of the BBCs most prominent voices on global news.
Williams is known for her investigative reporting on the rise of “fake news”, and she has often used social media to call out the media for its “fake reporting”.
Her tweets were published on Twitter on Thursday morning.
Williams said she was told she was “not a good reporter”, that she could not be trusted, and that she needed to “keep quiet”.
Williams has previously said she did not know about the threat to her job until she was interviewed by Harding in the run up to the 2014 general election, in which she stood against Conservative candidate Kellie Leitch.
“It was a personal attack on my integrity,” Williams said in an interview with the BBC.
Williams’s story sparked outrage in the UK, where politicians have long accused the BBC of bias against the media.
In January, the BBC announced that Harding had been suspended after a tweet in which he asked if she was interested in the job.
Harding later apologised for the tweet, which he described as “very tasteless”.
Williams was one of several reporters who received death threats after she revealed that the BBC had been forced to cut the pay of a senior correspondent after a complaint from her employer.
In 2016, Williams wrote an article for the Sunday Times which claimed that the British government was secretly paying “foreign agents” to run the UK’s intelligence services.
The report was widely criticised, and the BBC pulled the article from its website.
The BBC apologised for Williams’s reporting, saying it had not known the source of the allegations before the article was published.
Williams has also been an outspoken critic of the way the BBC covers the Iraq war, which she has called “a lie”.
Williams wrote in 2016 that the war had been “a major disaster” for the UK and that the “media are complicit in covering it up”.
Williams and other journalists have repeatedly criticised the BBC for being “politically correct” and for not accurately covering conflicts around the world.
“I have had my fair share of pressure from the BBC to do their job in a politically correct way and I have never felt the BBC was politically correct,” Williams told The Independent.
“When I have been told I can’t do my job because of a political issue, I have always said I have nothing to hide.”
Williams said in a tweet that she would “fight for truth, and truth is the truth”.