BBC resignations over Trump scandal show the pressures on public broadcasters – and why they must resist them
- Written by Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne
The resignations[1] of BBC Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness over dishonest editing of a speech in 2021 by US President Donald Trump raise several disturbing questions.
These concern the effectiveness and integrity of the BBC’s internal editorial procedures for investigating complaints, and the pressure being brought to bear on the BBC by conservative political and media forces in the United Kingdom.
The Trump controversy originated from the editing of a BBC Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?” It went to air a week before the 2024 US presidential election, and contained replays of sections of the speech Trump had made to his supporters just before the insurrection in Washington on 6 January 2021.
In the speech, Trump said at one point: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer our brave senators and congressmen and women.” Fifty minutes later, in the same speech, he said: “I’ll be with you. And we fight. Fight like hell.”
According to the BBC’s own account[2], these two quotes were spliced together to read: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol […] and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The effect was to give the impression Trump was egging on his supporters to violence.
At that time, a journalist called Michael Prescott was working as an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee. According to The Guardian[3], Prescott’s appointment to this role had been pushed by a BBC board member, Robbie Gibb, who had been communications chief for the former Conservative prime minister Theresa May and had also helped set up the right-wing broadcaster GB News.
Prescott left the BBC in June 2025, but during his time there he wrote a letter to the BBC board drawing their attention to what he saw as problems of “serious and systemic” editorial bias within the broadcaster. The dishonest editing of the Trump speech was one example he gave to support his case.
He wrote[4] that when these lapses had been brought to the attention of editorial managers, they “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards”.
That letter came into the possession of London’s Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper. On November 3 it published a story[5] based on it, under the headline: “Exclusive: BBC doctored Trump speech, internal report reveals”. The sub-heading read: “Corporation edited footage in Panorama programme to make it seem president was encouraging Capitol riot, according to whistleblower dossier”.
It is not known who the whistleblower was.
The Trump White House was on to this immediately, a press secretary describing the BBC as “100% fake news” and a “propaganda machine”. Trump himself posted[6] on his Truth Social platform that “very dishonest people” had “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election”, adding: “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!”
News Corporation’s British streaming service TalkTV predicted Trump will sue the BBC. As yet there have been no developments of that kind.
The Prescott revelations come only three weeks after the BBC reported[7] that the British broadcasting regulator Ofcom had found another BBC documentary, this time about the war in Gaza, had committed a “serious breach” of broadcasting rules by failing to tell its audience that the documentary’s narrator was the son of the Hamas minister for agriculture.
Ofcom concluded that the program, called “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone” was materially misleading by failing to disclose that family link.
These are egregious errors, and the journalists who made them should be called to account. But the resignation of the director-general and the CEO of news is so disproportional a response that it raises questions about what pressures were brought to bear on them and by whom.
The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail ran hard for a week on the Trump story, and this generated pressure[8] from the House of Commons culture committee to extract explanations from the BBC.
Politically, the timing was certainly inconvenient. The BBC is about to begin negotiations with the government over its future funding, and perhaps a calculation was made that these might proceed more fruitfully with a new director-general and head of news after a procession of controversies over the past couple of years.
On top of that was the Trump factor. Were there diplomatic pressures on the British government from the White House to see that some trophy scalps were taken?
Davie and Turness have each said that mistakes had been made, that the buck stopped with them, and that they were resigning on principle. Perhaps so, but the sources of pressure – the White House, the House of Commons, the conservative media – are such as to invite a closer scrutiny of the reasons for their departure.
They also seemed unable to respond effectively to the week-long onslaught from The Telegraph and Mail, either by defending their journalists or admitting mistakes had been made and that they had taken remedial steps.
It is also a reminder to public broadcasters like Australia’s ABC, that in the current political climate they are high-priority targets for right-wing media and politicians. The ABC has had its crisis with the Antoinette Lattouf case[9], which cost it more than $2.5 million for its management’s failure to stand up for its journalists against external pressure.
Fortunately it coincided with the planned departures of the chair and managing director, giving it the opportunity of a fresh start. The BBC is about to get a similar opportunity. Clearly it needs to more effectively enforce its editorial standards but it also needs to stand up for its people when they are unfairly targeted.
References
- ^ resignations (www.theguardian.com)
- ^ own account (www.bbc.com)
- ^ According to The Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
- ^ wrote (www.bbc.com)
- ^ a story (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ posted (www.theguardian.com)
- ^ BBC reported (www.bbc.com)
- ^ generated pressure (www.theguardian.com)
- ^ Antoinette Lattouf case (theconversation.com)
Authors: Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne
