Earlier this week, BBC Director General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness sensationally resigned in disgrace after it emerged that a Panorama documentary aired before last year’s elections had spliced different sections of President Trump’s speech on January 6th to give viewers the impression that he was calling on supporters to riot.
Furthermore, a leaked internal memo from a former ethics advisor found that BBC executives repeatedly ignored concerns over the “doctored” footage, which “materially misled” its audience, and left the documentary up on its iPlayer streaming service for a year.
In response, President Trump announced that he intends to sue the British state broadcaster for up to $1 billion (£760m), saying that he felt an “obligation” to take legal action against the BBC for having “defrauded the public”.
Legacy media figures, including some from the BBC, have attempted to claim that the resignations of Davie and Turness were a product of a right-wing “conspiracy” and that it represented an atempt to stage a “coup” to take over the reins of the publicly funded broadcaster, which by dint of its special right to impose an effective tax on British people to fund its operations is mandated to remain politically neutral.
However, on Thursday, London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that another BBC programme had made a similar edit to Trump’s speech, two years before the Panorama documentary. According to the broadsheet, a 2022 episode of BBC Newsnight, a flagship programme for the public broadcaster, also spliced together two separate sections of Trump’s speech to make it appear that the President had called for violence on January 6th.
The reportedly edited version of Trump’s comments, which aired without any flash to indicate an edit, made it seem that he said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women – and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you aren’t gonna have a country any more.”
In the actual address, President Trump urged his supporters to gather at the Capitol building “peacefully and patriotically”. Over fifty minutes later in the speech, while discussing the issue of election integrity, he vowed to “fight like hell” to ensure that elections are held in a free and fair manner.
The BBC Newsnight edit was challenged on air at the time by former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who resigned from the administration following the January 6th riots. After being played the edited speech, Mulvaney said on the Newsnight programme: “Your video actually spliced together the presentation.”
“That’s the type of messaging here that so many people in my country find frustrating, is that it’s hard to actually get the facts. If we’re going to have a debate about what this was and prevent it from happening again, I think part of that is to make sure we’re straightforward in our presentation of what actually happened,” Mulvaney said.
The host of the programme, Kirsty Wark, is said to have quickly moved on from the topic. Furthermore, a former Newsnight graphic designer, David Chaudoir, claims that concerns over the edit were dismissed by bosses during a post-mortem review of the show.
“The editorial editor… kind of brushed it off. And I thought that that was extraordinary, that something like that had gone out,” Chaudoir said.
The revelations of another misleading edit of Trump by the BBC has sparked another wave of criticism, with a Trump legal team spokesman saying that the British public broadcaster had “engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump by intentionally and deceitfully editing his historic speech in order to try and interfere in the Presidential Election.”
“President Trump will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in lies, deception, and fake news.”
Rebukes rolled in from within Britain as well, with Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice saying: “With shocking news of a second Trump edit, it’s clear BBC News is infected by anti-Trump poison. We’ve said consistently that a larger clear-out is needed; this is the additional proof required.”
Conservative Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston stated that the number of incidents suggests a “deep-rooted problem of bias” at the BBC and therefore called for a “full investigation” into the broadcaster.
For its part, a spokesman for the BBC said: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”
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