Exclusive: BBC ‘doctored’ Trump speech, internal report reveals

Corporation edited footage to make it seem president was encouraging Capitol riot, according to whistleblowing dossier Daily Telegraph 03/11/25 Link The BBC “doctored” a Donald Trump speech by making him appear to encourage the Capitol Hill riot, according to an internal whistleblowing memo seen by The Telegraph.

A Panorama programme, broadcast a week before the US election, “completely misled” viewers by showing the president telling supporters he was going to walk to the Capitol with them to “fight like hell”, when in fact he said he would walk with them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. The “mangled” footage was highlighted in a 19-page dossier on BBC bias, which was compiled by a recent member of the corporation’s standards committee and is now circulating in government departments. The dossier said the programme made the US president “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” by splicing together footage from the start of his speech with something he said nearly an hour later. It claimed senior executives and the BBC’s chairman had ignored and dismissed a string of serious complaints raised by the corporation’s own standards watchdog. The Telegraph will soon publish other excerpts of the memo, which accuse the BBC’s Arabic service of bias over its coverage of the war in Gaza, and accuse the corporation of “effective censorship” of its coverage of the transgender debate. The document raises serious questions about the culture at the BBC, how it affects impartiality and how managers including Tim Davie, the director-general, are accused of turning a blind eye to evidence of bias. The most damaging disclosures involve a one-hour Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? that was broadcast in October last year. As well as altering Mr Trump’s words, the documentary also showed flag-waving men marching on the Capitol in Washington DC on Jan 6 2021 after the president spoke, which “created the impression Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call to arms’”. In fact the footage, was shot before Mr Trump had even started speaking. The report said Panorama’s “distortion of the day’s events” was so egregious that viewers would ask: “Why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?” When the issue was raised with managers, they “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards”. The report’s author then warned Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, of the “very, very dangerous precedent” set by Panorama but received no reply. The internal whistleblower sent a copy of the 19-page letter to every member of the BBC Board last month. The revelation that the BBC effectively faked a Trump speech is likely to have serious repercussions for the corporation’s already strained relationship with the White House. It also comes ahead of negotiations with Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, over BBC funding as its royal charter comes up for renewal in 2027. Ms Nandy has previously said “no options are off the table”. In the Panorama programme, Mr 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 any more.” It was accompanied by foreboding music in the background and followed immediately by footage of people marching on the Capitol, with nothing to explain or signal to viewers that the footage had been edited or was out of sequence. The BBC had spliced together three separate parts of Mr Trump’s speech into what appeared to be one fluent sentence. In fact, what Mr Trump said was: “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 and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong… I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Some 54 minutes later, when Mr Trump was talking about elections being “corrupt”, he said of voters on election day: “Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life, but I 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 any more.” The BBC adviser who wrote the report compared the “shocking” breaches of impartiality to the “Crowngate” scandal in 2007 – when footage of the late Queen Elizabeth II was edited to make it look as though she was storming off a photoshoot – which led to the resignation of the controller of BBC One. The report on BBC bias was written by Michael Prescott, who spent three years as an independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) before leaving the role in June. Mr Prescott, a former journalist who has worked in a series of corporate advisory roles, said in a covering letter sent with his dossier, which is now circulating in Whitehall and has been seen by The Telegraph, that he had been moved to act because of his “despair at inaction by the BBC Executive when issues come to light”. He sent the dossier to the BBC Board because repeated warnings to the EGSC were “dismissed or ignored”. Mr Prescott wrote in the letter: “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 levelled particular criticism at Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s senior controller of news content, and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News. He said: “I have been surprised at just how defensive Deborah and Jonathan in particular have been whenever issues are raised. Firm and transparent action plans to prevent the re-occurrence ofproblems are in short supply – and so, as you can see, errors are repeated time and again.” The hour-long Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? was aired on Oct 28 last year. Mr Prescott, one of two independent editorial advisers sitting on the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee at the time, watched the programme and was struck by its “distinctly anti-Trump stance”, with 10 Trump critics featured against just one supporter. He said he was “shocked” to discover there was no similar programme examining the record of Kamala Harris, Mr Trump’s presidential rival. Mr Prescott raised concerns with the EGSC and David Grossman, the senior editorial adviser to the committee, was asked to review the programme. Mr Grossman “highlighted alarming concerns about how Panorama had edited Trump’s speech to his supporters” on Jan 6 2021. Mr Prescott wrote: “Examining the charge that Trump had incited protesters to storm Capitol Hill, it turned out that Panorama had spliced together two clips from separate parts of his speech. This created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers.” There was no screen wipe or caption over the footage to signal to viewers that it had been edited or was out of sequence. Mr Prescott said in his report: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that [Mr Trump] did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.” The footage also included an audio recording of a police despatcher warning of “three hundred Proud Boys” heading towards the seat of US government. This was despite the fact that a BBC Newsnight examination of the behaviour of the Trump-supporting Proud Boys, which came out in February 2021 and is still available on the BBC website, stated that the men were “marching on the Capitol even before Donald Trump had spoken at a rally”. Footage taken at the same time as the Panorama footage was timed at 10.58am that day, an hour before Mr Trump’s speech began. Mr Prescott said in his report: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that [Mr Trump] did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.” The documentary was produced and directed in-house by Matthew Hill, a BBC documentary maker, and edited by Karen Wightman, who has been Panorama’s editor since 2002. It remained on iPlayer for a year after being broadcast before being removed in line with BBC policy. BBC managers were alerted to the problems with the Panorama programme by Mr Prescott, who said in his letter: “If BBC journalists are to be allowed to edit video in order to make people ‘say’ things they never actually said, then what value are the corporation’s guidelines, why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end? “And yet, faced with David [Grossman]’s findings, the Executive refused to accept there had been a breach of standards and doubled down on its defence of Panorama.” According to Mr Prescott, at a meeting of the EGSC on May 12 this year Mr Munro said: “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.” Mr Prescott argued in his letter that “this completely goes against my understanding of BBC editorial policy regarding misleading edits”, and cited the example of “Crowngate”. On that occasion a trailer for a royal documentary had been edited to make it appear as though the late Queen had left a photoshoot “in a huff”, as Peter Fincham, the BBC One controller at the time, told the media, when in fact the clips in the trailer were out of sequence. Asked why there had not been a companion programme to the Trump documentary investigating the track record of Ms Harris, Mr Munro said it was not necessary “for due impartiality to have companion programmes”. Ms Turness also “tried to justify the doctored video and mangled timeline of the day” by citing a Democrat-packed congressional committee that concluded Mr Trump was involved in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, but Mr Prescott said this was “no justification for editing video clips so that a presidential candidate appears to say something he never did”. During the EGSC meeting, “neither the Director-General nor the Chairman made any comment about Jonathan’s dismissive attitude to David’s findings or Deborah’s defence of the edited video clips”, said Mr Prescott. Mr Prescott was so concerned that he emailed the BBC chairman the next day saying: “This is a very, very dangerous precedent. I hope you agree and take some form of action to ensure this potentially huge problem is nipped in the bud.” He did not receive a reply from Mr Shah. In September Mr Prescott wrote to each member of the BBC Board to express his dismay at the corporation turning a blind eye to the Panorama issue and other warnings of bias in recent years. Since then, his letter has found its way to government departments. Opposition MPs could call on Ms Nandy to launch an investigation. Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee has the power to summon Mr Davie, Mr Shah and others to give evidence about the matters raised in the report should it choose to do so. When the “Crowngate” scandal erupted, the BBC commissioned a report into the affair by Will Wyatt, a former BBC executive, who concluded that the editing of the trailer by an external production company had been done in a “cavalier fashion”, though nobody had deliberately set out to misrepresent the then Queen. Nevertheless, Mr Fincham resigned over the scandal. Mr Prescott declined to comment. A BBC spokesman 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.”