(LifeSiteNews) — Two key leaders of the BBC have resigned over the publication of a doctored clip of President Donald Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.
On November 8, Director General Tim Davie and the BBC’s news division Chief Executive Deborah Turness announced their resignations after a leaked internal memo revealed that the BBC had misleadingly spliced together parts of a speech given by Trump on January 6, 2021, to make it seem like he directly called for violence.
Davie said in a note to staff that he took “ultimate responsibility” for the mistake and that it was “entirely” his own decision.
Turness said the controversy had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC – an institution that I love.”
“The buck stops with me,” she concluded.
Last week, The Telegraph published details from a leaked internal memo by Michael Prescott, a former BBC adviser on editorial standards.
The memo accused the BBC of “serious and systemic” bias, with a key example being a 2024 episode of the investigative program Panorama that was aired right before the U.S. presidential election.
The BBC edited clips from Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech to supporters in front of Congress, splicing together two parts that were actually 54 minutes apart to make it appear as though Trump encouraged riots at the Capitol. The report left out the crucial part of the speech where Trump urged his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Brendan O’Neill of online magazine Spiked described the scandal as follows:
The accusation against the BBC comes from an internal document. A 19-page dossier on BBC bias was compiled by a one-time member of the Beeb’s [BBC’s] standards committee. The document’s findings are chilling. It singles out an episode of Panorama, the BBC flagship current-affairs show, for special opprobrium. Broadcast just a week before the presidential election in November 2024, it shows Trump in January 2021 saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell. [If] you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
There was only one problem: Trump didn’t say that. The BBC spliced together two entirely different remarks from Trump, made 54 minutes apart, in order to make it look like he was recklessly stirring up the mob and endangering the sanctity of American democracy. What Trump actually said was: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol … peacefully and patriotically to make your voices heard.” Then, almost an hour later, once more sharing his view that the election was “corrupt,” he thanked the people who voted for him and said: “We fight.” “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
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Trump reacted to the resignation of the top BBC executives on Truth Social, thanking The Telegraph “for exposing these corrupt ‘journalists.’”
“These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election,” Trump wrote. “On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!“
