The letter that shows the BBC has learnt nothing from its mistakes

Chairman Samir Shah’s tone in letter to MPs appears to downplay seriousness of doctored Trump speech at heart of crisis Daily Telegraph 10/11/25 Link Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, is facing questions of his own about the broadcaster’s bias scandal in the light of a letter he sent to a committee of MPs.

The letter is regarded by some in the corporation as overly defensive in tone, even apparently seeking to downplay the seriousness of the doctored Donald Trump speech at the heart of the crisis. Mr Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1bn (£760m) after a Panorama documentary was edited to make it appear as if he incited the Capitol Hill riot in 2021. Rather than issuing an apology to the US president, Mr Shah has told BBC News only that he is considering it. Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary who is in charge of hiring and firing BBC chairmen, has been closely following developments and must now decide whether Mr Shah’s response has been adequate. Mr Shah’s letter was sent to Caroline Dinenage, the chairman of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, who wrote to him last week demanding answers over The Telegraph’s revelations of bias. Here we analyse some of the key points of Mr Shah’s letter. BBC managers, including Mr Shah and Tim Davie, the director-general, knew about the doctored Trump documentary as long ago as January, but rather than taking action, they did nothing. The programme remained on BBC iPlayer until the end of October, one year after it was broadcast. By ignoring the warnings of Michael Prescott, its independent standards adviser, about the Panorama programme when they were raised in internal meetings, the BBC appeared to hope its guilty secret over Trump would indeed remain buried. It is true that the BBC has, in some cases, published corrections, including on some of the topics raised by Mr Prescott in a 19-page letter to members of the BBC Board, which was leaked to The Telegraph after it started circulating in Government departments. But Mr Prescott, who had a ringside seat to the BBC’s internal workings as an adviser to the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, told Board members: “What motivated me to prepare this note is despair at inaction by the BBC Executive when issues come to light. “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.” He also said: “I would argue that the Executive’s attitude when confronted with evidence of serious and systemic problems is now a systemic problem in itself.” Clearly, Mr Prescott does not agree with Mr Shah’s assessment of how the BBC has dealt with the problems he highlights. It may be too early to know how effective any changes to BBC Arabic have been, but Mr Prescott made clear in his letter that the division’s staff treated stories about the war in Gaza in a way that was “designed to minimise Israeli suffering and paint Israel as the aggressor”. Mr Prescott said in his letter that there needed to be “a genuine admission of just how deep-seated the problems are” in BBC Arabic. He may feel Mr Shah’s letter falls short. This is the only mention of the BBC’s reporting of gender issues, which Mr Prescott said had been effectively censored by the broadcaster’s LGBT desk within News. Mr Shah fails to address the suggestion that the LGBT desk was refusing to cover any stories that went against their radical trans ideology, something that BBC insiders insist is still a major problem. Mr Shah’s letter reveals that senior managers knew as long ago as January about the problem with the Panorama programme, meaning that for 11 months they sat on the information. The fact that Mr Shah is still trying to make excuses for the doctoring of the Trump clip is likely to raise concerns among members of the parliamentary committee. Rather than accurately presenting “what was happening on the ground at that time” as Mr Shah suggests, Panorama showed footage of people marching on the Capitol out of sequence – the very opposite of what was happening on the ground at the time. The very reason the programme did not attract significant audience feedback is almost certainly because the editing of Mr Trump’s speech was so slick that no one watching the programme would have been aware that he never said people should go to the Capitol and “fight like hell”. Again, Mr Shah appears to have missed the point. If Mr Shah is so passionate about impartiality and trust, why did he do nothing when Mr Prescott made managers, including him, aware of what Panorama had done? And why, when Mr Prescott later wrote to him in person about the same subject, did he not even bother to reply?