The man whose leaked memo brought down the BBC director general and led to crisis at the public broadcaster has said Donald Trump’s reputation was not damaged by the Panorama editing scandal.
“Probably not,” was the verdict from Michael Prescott who appeared today at a bombshell hearing in front of the UK’s Culture, Media & Sport Committee (CMSC), during which he was pushed on whether the edit damaged Trump. The furore has caused scandal at the BBC, a $1B legal threat from Trump and shock resignations of the DG and news chief.
“I can’t think of anything I agree with Donald Trump on,” Prescott also said during the hearing when considering how the BBC managed to so deeply mess up the Panorama, which has led to the BBC’s worst crisis in years.
He was also forced to defend reports that his communications firm Hannover received a $115,000 donation from Larry Ellison, who has close ties to Trump.
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Prescott’s excoriating memo was the catalyst for the resignations of Director General Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness. He had been advising the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines & Standards Committee (EGSC) but stepped down as he felt his concerns were not being taken seriously.
His memo exposed how the BBC had spliced footage of Donald Trump from one hour apart to make it appear as if he was inciting a riot on Jan 6. Prescott raised other issues with BBC coverage over Israel-Gaza, the trans debate and ethnic minorities in the UK, although it was the Trump edit, which has led to a $1B threat of legal action, that has generated headlines.
Prescott said he watched the Trump Panorama last year and immediately felt like it was imbalanced. He passed this on to ex-BBC correspondent David Grossman, whose review was the basis for his memo.
“It felt quite anti-Trump and I thought they might be as hard on Kamala Harris next week,” added Prescott. “But there was a black and white response [from the BBC]. They did not accept there was a problem with their U.S. presidential coverage or the Panorama program. And they had a different view about the video splice.”
Pressed on what a similar BBC Harris Panorama would have looked like, Prescott said it could have viewed her “track record” and the “secret of her appeal.”
Prescott was repeatedly pressed on whether the BBC displays bias with its news coverage, but he denied this.
“I don’t think it’s biased,” he said. “I didn’t use that phrase anywhere in the memo. Let’s be clear, tonnes of stuff it does is world class. Everything I spotted [in the memo] had systemic causes and the root of my disagreement is the BBC was not treating these as having systemic casues.”
While accusations of institutional bias have been thrown around since the BBC entered crisis mode, Prescott saw the “systemic causes” as the BBC refusing to listen criticism of its news coverage and being overly defensive.
“I was frequently seeing the BBC’s idea of dealing with something was to change the editors around and tweak guidelines,” added Prescott. “There was never any willingness to look at what went wrong there and there were deep implications.”
Prescott denied several times he leaked the memo to the Telegraph and said the fact the Telegraph is seen as right-leaning was a “bit of a barrier to people elsewhere on the [political] spectrum taking this as seriously or thinking it was as straightforward as it seems.” Prescott did, however, send the memo to the UK regulator Ofcom and to the UK’s Culture, Media & Sport Deparment, he said. He refused to say he would submit the documentation he filled in in order to land his adviser role on the EGSC.
Prescott took no pleasure from Davie resigning, he said, calling him a “supreme talent, and it’s a tragedy he’s gone, but he had this blindspot on editorial failings.” “I always liked the guy,” added Prescott. “He seemed to be to be doing a first rate job across 80% to 90% of the portfolio apart from his blindspot on editorial failings.”
Prescott joined with others to call for the DG job to be split in the future.
Robbie Gibb was “more vocal than others”
Since Davie and Turness stepped down, pressure has ramped up on BBC Chair Samir, with a BBC board member resigning dramatically on Friday, claiming that he was “not consulted” on key matters like Davie’s resignation.
The whole debacle has placed a huge spotlight on the BBC Board and one of its members, Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative Party spin doctor who has been accused in some quarters of leading a coup against Davie and Turness. The argument goes that, from his seat on the EGSC, Gibb orchestrated the content reviews that helped inform Prescott’s memo. Gibb will appear in front of the committee after Prescott.
“Robbie is robust in how he expresses his opinion and wants the BBC to do well,” was the view of a different EGSC adviser, Caroline Daniel, who spoke to the committee alongside Prescott this afternoon.
Prescott denied that some members of the EGSC were “more vocal than others” and said he is “no ideological soulmate of Robbie Gibb.” “I’m a centrist dad,” he joked.
Prescott also blasted the BBC for failing to take into account the learnings from several content reviews, which had been conducted since soon after Davie took over the job and prioritized ridding impartiality issues above almost all else. “The BBC had a bit of a blind spot for methodically following through as I thought they should,” he added. “They needed to look at why the implementation was not better.”
Prescott said he is a passionate champion of public service broadcasting who took on the EGSC adviser role as it looked like a “fantastic opportunity.” “I come from a working class background, I’m the son of immigrants and got into Oxford from a local state school partly because of the excellence of public service broadcasting,” he added.