by WorldTribune Staff, November 10, 2025 Real World News
The top two officials at the British Broadcasting Corporation quit the state-funded media behemoth after the BBC was called out for editing President Donald Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, 2021 to give the appearance that he was inciting a riot.
BBC Director General Tim Davie and CEO Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday.
Davie said he resigned after “reflecting on the very intense personal and professional demands of managing this role over many years in these febrile times.”
“Like all public organizations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent and accountable,” Davie added. “While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision.”
“The ongoing controversy around the Panorama on President Trump has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC – an institution that I love,” Turness said. “The buck stops with me,” she added. “While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
“Bye-bye, BBC,” one British analyst said on the air the wake of the resignations. “This is basically being Dr. Frankenstein to turn a man into a monster. It’s just outright lying.”
Britain’s Telegraph newspaper had revealed details of a leaked BBC memo suggesting its documentary show “Panorama” edited two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly promote rioting. The report said the BBC had broadcast the “mangled” clip just one week before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The memo was written by Michael Prescott, who until June 2025 was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC). He states in the memo how he was utterly appalled at the nature and scale of the BBC’s biased, misleading and untruthful reporting that had been reported to the standards committee but had been brushed aside by BBC executives.
Trump posted to Truth SociaL:
The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught “doctoring” my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th. Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these Corrupt “Journalists.” These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election. On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!
The Telegraph reported that the BBC’s current affairs program Panorama, had spliced together two clips from separate parts of Trump’s speech to make it appear falsely that he had exhorted his supporters to go down and fight on Capitol Hill.
The edited Panorama clip had Trump saying:
We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be 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.
What Trump actually said:
We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
“We fight like hell” came 54 minutes later.
The program’s “speech” clip was followed by video footage of the Proud Boys marching towards Congress.
“This created the impression that these supporters had taken up his ‘call-to-arms’ that wasn’t,” Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, author and broadcaster, wrote in a Substack.com analysis. “In fact, the Proud Boys had marched to Capitol Hill before Trump had started speaking. This wasn’t just bias. It was journalistic fraud.”
Phillips also pointed to a separate report on the BBC’s reporting relating to the discovery of mass graves in Gaza. The first was discovered at Al Nasser hospital and the second at Al Shifa, the BBC reported. The strong implication in the coverage was that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area. The source for both stories was the Hamas controlled Gaza Civil Defense Agency. This was not reflected in the coverage.
One online story incorrectly implied a UN official had corroborated the reports of hands being tied. The most likely explanation was the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and the people buried there had died or been killed prior to the arrival of Israeli ground forces.
The internal report to the EGSC flagged: “There was no independent corroboration of allegations of war crimes, including alleged evidence of summary executions, torture and bodies found with their hands tied together”.
“This is wicked, wicked stuff,” Phillips wrote. “And by a broadcasting outlet that is more influential around the world — including the volcanic Middle East — than any other because it is trusted as a kitemark of truth and fairness.”
Phillips continued: “And this has had consequences. As producers of Britain’s cultural mood-music, the BBC has been drip-feeding poison about Israel into the nation’s psyche for years while ignoring, downplaying or sanitizing its attackers in Britain as well as in the Middle East. It is thus directly responsible for contributing to the tsunami of Jew-hatred being suffered by Britain’s Jewish community, as well as ramping up the already hysterical hatred of Jews in the Muslim world. The BBC has Jewish blood on its hands.”
Prescott states in the memo that senior BBC executives repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve the problems that were being highlighted, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all. Prescott, a former political editor of the Sunday Times, has held various corporate roles.
He says: “On no other occasion in my professional life have I witnessed what I did at the BBC with regard to how management dealt with (or failed to deal with) serious recurrent problems.”
Prescott also raises concerns about reporting over a range of other issues, including his observation that a unit of rogue LGBT+ reporters is censoring coverage of the trans debate, and how none other than the BBC’s own flagship “fact-checking” service, Verify, produced a “thoroughly wrong” report suggesting car insurers were racist.
Meanwhile The Sunday Telegraph reports that the BBC is set to have a review of its climate and energy policy reporting over potential errors and bias.
Phillips concluded: “BBC executives, like many if not most of its journalists, believe that their left-wing mindset is the political center-ground and thus embodies balance, fairness and truth. Anyone who challenges that mindset is therefore axiomatically regarded as an extremist or hopeless partisan and is self-righteously ignored.
“The BBC embodies a hermetically-sealed thought system. It has betrayed its core Charter principles of truth and fairness and is a disgrace to journalism. The case for de-funding it is now overwhelming.”
British journalist made case for defunding BBC over fake news about Trump, Gaza added by Editor Two on
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