The BBC has been accused by a “whistleblower” of selectively editing Donald Trump‘s January 6 speech to make it appear as if the president was encouraging the 2021 Capitol riot.
A former external adviser to the BBC board took issue with a 2024 episode of Panorama, in which edits were made to Trump’s remarks without them being clearly disclosed to viewers.
Michael Prescott, a managing director at Hanover Communications, compiled a 19-page dossier about the incident and other concerns regarding BBC bias. His report was obtained by The Daily Telegraph.
The issue has sparked fury in the MAGA universe. In a post on X/Twitter, Donald Trump Jr. wrote: “The FAKE NEWS ‘reporters’ in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s*** as the ones here in America!!!!”
Watch on Deadline
In the Panorama documentary, Trump appears to say: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
He actually said: “We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen.”
Some 54 minutes later, when Trump was talking about the U.S. election being “corrupt,” he said: “Something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
Prescott, who spent three years as an external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee before exiting in June, raised questions with the committee, BBC executives, and the corporation’s board. He said his concerns were “dismissed or ignored.”
In a covering letter to his report, Prescott said: “I departed [from the advisory role] with profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC…my view is that the executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all.”
He accused BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and Jonathan Munro, BBC News’ global director, of being “defensive” whenever issues were raised. Prescott, a former journalist, added that Turness “tried to justify the doctored video and mangled timeline of the day” by citing a January 6th Committee that concluded Trump was involved in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
A BBC spokesperson said: “While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully. Michael Prescott is a former adviser to a board committee where differing views and opinions of our coverage are routinely discussed and debated.”
Other critics of the Trump edit included Boris Johnson, the former British prime minister. “The BBC has doctored footage of Trump to make it look as though he incited a riot – when he in fact said no such thing. We have Britain’s national broadcaster using a flagship programme to tell palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally,” he said.