Copyright New York Post
If you come for Donald J. Trump, you better not miss. That’s a lesson the BBC just learned the hard way. The Beeb went after Trump, slurring him with vicious lies. It used its flagship current-affairs show to defame him as a fascistic monster who stirred up violence at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And the result of these outrageous libels has been not the fall of Trump, but the fall of the BBC. The Beeb thought it could drag down the leader of the free world — but ended up dragging its own reputation into the gutter, burying itself in its own Trump-phobic BS. It is hands-down the worst crisis Britain’s publicly funded broadcaster has ever faced. On Sunday, Director-General Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness both resigned, plunging the Beeb into mayhem. They stepped down just days after an explosive 19-page dossier penned by a former member of the BBC’s own standards committee was leaked to a British newspaper. Its diagnosis was stinging: The Beeb, it found, has become disgracefully biased, constantly letting its woke prejudices get in the way of truth-telling. The memo flagged up the case of “Panorama,” the Beeb’s long-standing current-affairs show. In November 2024, just days before the US presidential election, the program aired a shocking clip of Trump on Jan. 6 saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell.” Only one problem: Trump never said that. The BBC was lying. It spliced together two entirely different remarks, made 54 minutes apart, to make it look like he was marshalling the mob into a frenzy of violence. What Trump actually said was that people should march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol and “make your voices heard”. By deleting his “peacefully” comment, and replacing it with a comment he made almost an hour later about “fighting like hell” against corruption, the BBC painted him as a demonic instigator of chaos. The seriousness of this cannot be overstated. The BBC doctored the footage. It twisted the truth to serve ideological ends. These were Pravda levels of manipulation. The BBC’s London headquarters honors George Orwell with a statue outside the building. Yet the modern Beeb seems hell-bent on emulating Big Brother, Orwell’s most monstrous fictional creation, which likewise mangled reality for political purposes. This scandal brings shame on the whole of Britain. The BBC is publicly funded — in fact, us Brits are compelled by law to pay for it by stumping up £175 every year for a TV license, on pain of arrest. And while it’s editorially independent, the government appoints its leaders and regulates the BBC Charter — the constitution that outlines the broadcaster’s “public mission”. So this low and nasty attack on Trump is nothing less than a diplomatic incident, implicating our government as well as our journalists. Trump is now threatening the BBC with a $1 billion lawsuit if it doesn’t issue a “full and fair retraction” of the lies it broadcast. Good on him. What the BBC did was nothing less than electoral meddling — the grotesque slandering of a presidential candidate on the eve of an election. And Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t the only thing ailing the BBC. The internal memo also found the BBC has failed catastrophically on the trans issue, engaging in “effective censorship” of gender-critical women who do not accept that dudes can become ladies. The “LGBT desk” has been “captured by a small group of people,” the report said, who constantly pump trans extremism into the airwaves with no regard for “balance or objectivity.” Worse, the report judged the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict to be alarmingly one-sided, continually “minimi[zing] Israeli suffering.” Gripped by a “desire always to believe the worst about Israel,” the BBC “raced to air” Hamas allegations against the Jewish state without adequate checks. Such was the extent of its Israelophobic misinformation that the BBC has been forced to correct two stories about Gaza every single week since Oct. 7, 2023. Essentially, the broadcaster became a mouthpiece for Hamas’s sickening propaganda, fueling antisemitism in the UK and around the world. The BBC loves to pose as an island of truth in a swirling sea of digital misinformation. Yet we now know it is a font of falsehoods, pumping out untruths about Trump, unscientific nonsense about transgenderism and dangerous lies about Israel. This is what happens when institutions get corrupted by wokeness. I have so many fond childhood memories of the BBC. From “Top of the Pops” to David Attenborough’s wondrous documentaries, it was once a great source of entertainment and information. But it sold its soul to the devil of political correctness — and sacrificed its world-famous neutrality at the altar of ideology.
