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Journalism of Courage
Two of the top executives of the BBC resigned abruptly on Sunday (November 9) after a The Daily Telegraph report claimed that the British public broadcaster had misleadingly edited a speech made by Donald Trump on January 6, 2020, before MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol Hill.
“Like all public organisations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent and accountable,” said Tim Davie, who quit as director-general of the BBC, in a statement on Sunday. “While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision.”
Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, also resigned. “The ongoing controversy… has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC… the buck stops with me,” she said. Notably, Turness insisted that despite the ongoing controversy, “recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
Indeed some news insiders have suggested that the high profile exits were not simply a reaction to external criticism, but effectively the result of an internal coup in the highest echelons of the British broadcaster.
“It was a coup, and worse than that, it was an inside job. There were people inside the BBC, very close to the board… on the board, who have systematically undermined Tim Davie and his senior team over a period of [time] and this has been going on for a long time. What happened yesterday didn’t just happen in isolation,” David Yelland, former editor of The Sun, and co-host of the podcast series When It Hits the Fan, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
One week before Ameriacans voted to return Donald Trump to the White House last year, the BBC aired an hour-long Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? (Panorama is a documentary series that the BBC has been broadcasting since 1953.)
A year later, on November 3, the conservative-leaning British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published a story claiming that the BBC had doctored Trump’s footage for the aforementioned documentary. The report cited an internal memo by Michael Prescott, formerly an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board.
The memo, which The Daily Telegraph has now released in full, essentially accused the BBC of holding serious bias in its reporting, and ignoring concerns raised by people like Prescott.
“My view is that the [BBC] Executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all,” Prescott wrote to the Board of the British public broadcaster.
Prescott complained about bias on a gamut of subjects, from the reportage on Gaza in BBC Arabic, which he said was “pro-Hamas”, to the coverage around LGBTQ+ issues (he wrote: “…LGBTQ desk staffers would decline to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans-debate”).
But the point most played up by The Daily Telegraph, in part due to the detail Prescott himself provides in the memo, was about the Trump documentary. Prescott wrote:
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“…Examining the charge that Trump had incited protesters to storm Capitol Hill, it turned out that Panorama had spliced together two clips from separate parts of his speech. The spliced together version of Trump’s comments aired by Panorama made it seem that he said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.” In reality, the first part of Trump’s speech: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you,” came 15 minutes into the speech. The second half of the sentence that was aired by Panorama, “and we fight. We fight like hell…” came 54 minutes later. Fifteen minutes into the speech, what Trump actually said: “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Story continues below this ad It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it…” |
The Daily Telegraph’s report has emboldened critics of the BBC, who have long accused the broadcaster of editorial bias.
Notably, the White House directly went after the outlet for its coverage of Trump. White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, reacting to the leaked memo, accused the BBC of being “purposefully dishonest” over its depiction of the Capitol Hill insurrection.
Conservative critics in Britain too have piled on. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Tory, wrote on X: “This is a total disgrace…We have Britain’s national broadcaster using a flagship programme to tell palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally. Is anyone at the BBC going to take responsibility — and resign?”
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said, “It’s no wonder that fewer people are paying the BBC licence fee every single year.” (The BBC is funded primarily from a license fee paid by British households).
But those in the know also flag that the attack on the BBC is months in the making, and a part of a larger right-wing push to gain more control over the organisation.
“It’s clear that there is a genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes,” wrote Nick Robinson, a presenter on Today, the flagship morning radio show, on social media. “There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation.”
Senior journalist Adam Boulton, a former political editor of Sky News, said on X that he thought claims of bias on this occasion were “BS (bullshit)”, adding it was “fake news to suggest Donald Trump did not egg on what happened on 6 January”. He said that it was not unusual to edit together sections of a long speech to accurately summarise it.
This “coup” comes amid ongoing efforts by conservative politicians to push the BBC further to the right. The Guardian reported that Prescott’s appointment as an external adviser had been pushed by the BBC board member Robbie Gibb, Tory PM Theresa May’s former communications chief who helped set up the rightwing broadcaster GB News. Gibb was appointed to the position by Johnson.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, of the Labour Party, has notably said that he does not believe that the BBC is “institutionally biased”.
On Monday, BBC Chair Samir Shah apologised for an “error of judgment” and promised better accountability in the future. However, he pushed back against the insinuation that the BBC “sought to bury” the issues highlighted by Prescott in his leaked memo, calling it “simply not true”.
