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What would you say if you learnt that the BBC had doctored a video of a politician’s speech to make him sound more extreme, incendiary and dangerous than he really was?
I’m sure you would be deeply shocked. Despite writing about BBC excesses for many years, I certainly was. Could it really be true? Incredibly, it is.
A week before last November’s US election, the Beeb broadcast an edition of its flagship current affairs programme Panorama in which Donald Trump was made to say something he never had. Something outrageous.
A disgraceful section of Trump: A Second Chance? concerned the Capitol Hill riots in Washington, which took place on January 6, 2021. Trump was shown telling his supporters that he was going to walk to the Capitol with them to ‘fight like hell’ when in fact what he said was that he would walk with them ‘to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard’.
What the BBC had done was to splice together two parts of Trump’s speech that were almost an hour apart. The effect was to make it sound as though he was inciting an insurrection, which he certainly wasn’t, as the clip manufactured by the BBC was literally faked.
I am far from being an admirer of Trump’s and have in these pages accused him of inciting an insurrection. Now I ask myself whether I and millions of others were deliberately misled by our state broadcaster.
Even as I write these words, I am pinching myself. Could the BBC really be guilty of such an enormous breach of faith? I am afraid so. We are indebted to Michael Prescott, a former external independent adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial guidelines and standards committee. He left that body in June – seven months after the programme was first shown on October 28, 2024 – and an internal dossier written by him was this week leaked to The Daily Telegraph.
The falsification of Trump’s speech in the Panorama programme isn’t the only scandal. The documentary also showed flag-waving men marching on the Capitol after the President spoke which, according to Mr Prescott, ‘created the impression that Trump’s supporters had taken up his call to arms’. In fact, the footage was shot before he started speaking.
When he was a member of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, Michael Prescott presented his findings to various panjandrums. He was met with a brick wall. He couldn’t persuade anyone that something dreadful and reprehensible had been done. Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s senior controller of news content, is quoted as saying: ‘It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short-form clips.’
Really? Normal to splice remarks uttered nearly an hour apart to make the President of the United States say something he never actually said? If such behaviour is really considered normal at the Corporation, one truly despairs.
As I write, the BBC is stonewalling on these damning allegations. A spokesperson said: ‘While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully.’
Imagine if the crudest and rudest red-top tabloid had doctored the speech of a hero of the Left – say, Jeremy Corbyn. Auntie would be full of righteous indignation, and properly so. I can tell BBC executives something for free. A huge storm is coming their way.
Let us try to get into the minds of those who edited the original Panorama programme and of executives who apparently can’t understand that an unforgivable betrayal of journalistic values has taken place. Trump may be a disagreeable human being, but that is beside the point. How could these people have thought it permissible to misrepresent what he said?
The answer, I think, lies in the way that many on the Left (as well as on the far-Right) think about their political opponents. They believe in a kind of ideological truth. Trump may not have said what they made him say, but in their view he might have done. There is a long history on the Left of manipulating the truth to serve a greater cause.
In 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, the communist journalist Claud Cockburn and a similarly minded colleague concocted a fascist massacre, which they reported had happened in Spanish Morocco. It was completely invented. Cockburn’s crooked defence was that the atrocity might have taken place, and therefore it was excusable to pretend that it had.
The BBC’s pervasive bias against the Right is usually unconscious. It reflects the political pre-disposition of the vast majority of its journalists. What has happened here is even more alarming. Just as Claud Cockburn made up a fascist massacre, so the BBC has preposterously fabricated a speech which it thinks Trump – in its view the epitome of evil – could have delivered.
I’ve no doubt that most people will be appalled, including some who see themselves as being on the Left. It is very hard to see how those responsible for this deception can hang on to their jobs, and the position of BBC director-general, Tim Davie, must surely be in question. Sir Keir Starmer may live to regret saying last night that he has ‘full confidence’ in Davie.
Michael Prescott’s dossier also alleges that the BBC Arabic service (which is partly funded by the Foreign Office) systematically gave large amounts of space to statements from the terrorist group Hamas, making its editorial slant ‘considerably different’ to that of the main BBC website.
Not that Auntie has been unbiased on her home ground. Media regulator Ofcom has recently sanctioned the Beeb for failing to disclose that the child narrator of a heart-rending documentary about Gaza, How To Survive A Warzone, was the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.
Such examples of partiality are thoroughly discreditable in an organisation that is enjoined by its charter to be neutral and, despite a mountain of the evidence to the contrary, persists in maintaining that it is.
Nonetheless, the manipulation of Trump’s speech is of a different order of seriousness. The irony is that it will give the vainglorious President ample cause to allege that the BBC – which has its global good name to defend – is in the business of propagating fake news. Donald Trump Junior has already crowed on X about the BBC being ‘just as dishonest’ as American news organisations. On this evidence, who can gainsay him?
President Trump has already sued several American media outlets. He alleged an ABC anchor defamed him by stating that he had been found liable for rape, though he was found liable in a civil case for defamation and sexual abuse. And the President accused CBS, rather persuasively I think, of deceptively editing an interview with Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris to make her sound more impressive than she was.
Both broadcasters settled out of court: ABC paying £12million and CBS £13.5million.
Now Trump potentially has an even stronger case against the BBC for portraying him in a false light. Whether or not he brings an action, many around the world will think that the famous broadcaster is gravely at fault. Its reputation is likely to suffer.
In the end Donald Trump can look after himself. But the BBC belongs to us. It stands accused of a grotesque error of judgment. Will any of its highly paid executives finally take responsibility for what it has done?