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The head of the BBC, Tim Davie, and the UK national broadcaster’s head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned on Sunday after a report by UK newspaper The Telegraph alleged that the broadcaster edited a speech by US President Donald Trump in a way that linked him to the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riots and the associated violence. The broadcaster’s chairman, Samir Shah, said an apology letter will be written to the UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Monday to express regret over how the Panorama documentary spliced together parts of Trump’s remarks. The BBC has faced mounting criticism for editing a speech that Trump delivered on January 6, 2021, before protesters attacked the US Capitol in Washington. On that day, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., as Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. The crowd breached security barriers, clashed with police and ransacked offices, forcing lawmakers to evacuate and temporarily halting the certification process. The violence left five people dead and hundreds injured, including law enforcement officers. The attack was widely condemned across the political spectrum as an assault on American democracy, and it led to Trump’s second impeachment by the US House of Representatives for “incitement of insurrection.” He was later acquitted by the Senate. Following The Telegraph’s report, the broadcaster came under scrutiny after observers noted that the edited version of Trump’s speech used in the Panorama documentary was misleading and omitted the section where Trump had called on his supporters to demonstrate peacefully. The documentary, produced by BBC Panorama and titled Trump: A Second Chance?, was broadcast by the BBC the week before last year’s US election. What Was The Issue With The Edit? Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee, flagged the Panorama documentary among several examples of concern in a memo where he questioned the broadcaster’s impartiality. The memo, accessed by The Telegraph, formed the basis of the newspaper’s report published over the past week. Prescott’s memo alleged that the BBC had selectively edited a speech by Donald Trump in the Panorama episode broadcast a week before the US election, suggesting that the edit presented the former president’s remarks in a misleading way. In the same memo, Prescott also raised concerns about BBC Arabic, citing a review by BBC journalist David Grossman which found “systemic problems within BBC Arabic” and evidence of anti-Israel bias. The BBC, which is publicly funded through a licence fee paid by anyone watching live television in the UK, has faced a series of editorial controversies in recent months. Earlier this year, it issued several apologies for “serious flaws” in the making of another documentary, Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, which aired in February. In October, the broadcaster accepted a sanction from the UK media watchdog for what was described as a “materially misleading” programme, after it emerged that the child narrator featured in the film was the son of Hamas’s former deputy agriculture minister.
