From the BBC:
Last week, the Telegraph published an exclusive report, external, saying it had seen a leaked internal BBC memo.
The memo came from Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee. He left the role in June.
The memo suggested that the one-hour Panorama documentary had edited parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riot of January 2021.
In his speech in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, Trump said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
However, in the Panorama edit he was shown saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The two sections of the speech that were edited together were more than 50 minutes apart.
The “fight like hell” comment was taken from a section where Trump discussed how “corrupt” US elections were. In total, he used the words “fight” or “fighting” 20 times in the speech.
According to the Telegraph, the document said Panorama’s “distortion of the day’s events” would leave viewers asking: “Why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?”
When the issue was raised with managers, the memo continued, they “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards”.
The BBC has come under scrutiny over a number of other different issues in recent weeks.
The Telegraph also reported that Mr Prescott raised concerns about a lack of action to address “systemic problems” of anti-Israel bias in the coverage of the Gaza war by the BBC Arabic news service.
The report also said Mr Prescott had raised concerns about the BBC’s coverage around trans issues.
And on Thursday, the BBC upheld 20 impartiality complaints over the way presenter Martine Croxall earlier this year altered a script she was reading live on the BBC News Channel, which referred to “pregnant people”.
The BBC is facing an existential crisis. It’s facing massive competition from the streaming services as well as changes in how people spend their leisure time. Young people are more likely to watch TikTok or YouTube, and many people now listen to podcasts rather than live radio. YouTube overtook ITV to become the UK’s second most-watched media service, behind only the BBC.
In July this year, the BBC disclosed that an extra 300,000 households had ceased paying the licence fee. The broadcaster’s yearly report showed that 23.8 million licences were active at year-end, falling from 24.1 million in 2023-24. I am surprised it is still that many, as most young people consider the license fee and the fact that people can be sent to jail for not paying it utterly bonkers.
There is talk of replacing the license fee with a subscription, but the BBC are resistant to that.
Personally, I think the license fee should be scrapped, and a UK media fund should be paid for out of general taxation. This would fund an independent news service, and crucially, local news services. As well as supporting TV and films.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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