EXCLUSIVE: BBC DOCTORED SPEECH BY US PRESIDENT

 

The BBC ‘doctored’ a speech made by the US President and aired it a week before last year's Presidential election with a view to influencing the outcome, an internal report has revealed.

The BBC “doctored” a Donald Trump speech, making him look like he was urging on the Capitol Hill riot, as laid out in an internal whistleblowing memo that The Telegraph has seen.

A Panorama programme, aired just a week before the US election, completely misled its audience. It showed the president telling supporters he would join them on a walk to the Capitol to “fight like hell”, but in reality, he had said he would go with them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.

This mangled footage features in a 19-page dossier on BBC bias, put together by a former member of the BBC’s standards committee. That document is now making the rounds in government departments.

The dossier points out how the programme effectively made the US president “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” by cutting together clips from the beginning of his speech with remarks he made almost an hour later.

It also accuses senior executives and the BBC’s chairman of brushing off and ignoring a series of grave complaints from the corporation’s own standards watchdog.

The Telegraph plans to share other parts of the memo shortly. Those sections call out the BBC’s Arabic service for bias in its Gaza war coverage, and they claim the corporation has been carrying out “effective censorship” on the transgender debate.

This document casts a harsh light on the culture inside the BBC, its impact on impartiality, and how managers, including director-general Tim Davie, stand accused of ignoring clear signs of bias.

The toughest revelations centre on a one-hour Panorama special titled Trump: A Second Chance?, which went out in October 2024.

Beyond twisting Mr Trump’s words, the documentary included shots of flag-waving men marching towards the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, right after the president’s speech. That created the sense that Trump’s supporters were heeding his “call to arms”. In truth, those shots were filmed before Mr Trump had even begun speaking.

The report describes Panorama’s take on the day’s events as such a blatant distortion that viewers might well wonder why they should trust the BBC at all, and where such practices could lead.

When staff brought the matter to managers, they flatly refused to admit any standards had been breached. The report’s author then alerted Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, to the “very, very dangerous precedent” set by Panorama, but got no response.

This internal whistleblower sent a copy of the full 19-page letter to every member of the BBC Board last month.

The fact that the BBC essentially faked a Trump speech could seriously damage its already tense ties with the White House.

It arrives too just before talks with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy on BBC funding, as the royal charter heads towards renewal in 2027. Ms Nandy has made it clear before that “no options are off the table” for BBC funding.

In the Panorama programme, Mr Trump seems to declare: “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.” Ominous music plays in the background, and it cuts straight to footage of crowds marching on the Capitol, with no warning that the clip has been edited or that the sequence is out of order.

The BBC had stitched together three distinct sections of Mr Trump’s speech to form what sounded like one smooth line.

What Mr Trump actually said was this: “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 on, while Mr Trump was discussing “corrupt” elections, he told 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 behind the report draws a stark parallel between these shocking lapses in impartiality and the infamous “Crowngate” scandal. That involved editing footage of the late Queen Elizabeth II to suggest she was storming out of a photoshoot, which forced the controller of BBC One to step down.

The bias report comes from Michael Prescott, who served three years as an independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) until he left in June.

Mr Prescott, a former journalist turned corporate adviser, explained in a covering letter with his dossier – now circulating in Whitehall and viewed by The Telegraph – that he felt compelled to speak out due to his “despair at inaction by the BBC Executive when issues come to light”.

He forwarded the dossier to the BBC Board after his repeated alerts to the EGSC fell on deaf ears or were outright dismissed.

In the letter, he wrote: “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.”

Mr Prescott saves his sharpest words for Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s senior controller of news content, and Deborah Turness, chief executive of BBC News.

He noted: “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 of problems are in short supply – and so, as you can see, errors are repeated time and again.”

### How the BBC ‘manifestly misled’ its viewers

On 28 October last year, a week ahead of the US election, the BBC broadcast its hour-long Panorama special, Trump: A Second Chance?

Mr Prescott, one of two independent editorial advisers on the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee back then, tuned in and immediately noted its “distinctly anti-Trump stance”. The show lined up 10 Trump critics against a single supporter. He was stunned to learn there was no equivalent programme scrutinising his rival, Kamala Harris.

Mr Prescott flagged his worries to the EGSC, and David Grossman, the committee’s senior editorial adviser, stepped in to review the show.

Mr Grossman flagged up serious issues around how Panorama had handled Trump’s speech to supporters on 6 January 2021.

As Mr Prescott put it: “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.”

The edit came without any on-screen cue or caption to tip off viewers that it had been cut or was not in chronological order.

In his report, Mr Prescott stressed: “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 layered in an audio clip of a police despatcher alerting to “three hundred Proud Boys” advancing on the US government seat. Yet a BBC Newsnight piece on the Trump-backing Proud Boys, released in February 2021 and still online, makes clear those men were “marching on the Capitol even before Donald Trump had spoken at a rally”. Shots from the same moment as the Panorama ones were timestamped at 10.58am that day, a full hour before Mr Trump took the stage.

Mr Prescott reiterated 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 BBC filmmaker Matthew Hill, with editing by Karen Wightman, Panorama’s editor since 2002. It stayed on iPlayer for a year post-broadcast, then came down per BBC rules.

### What did the BBC do about it?

Mr Prescott tipped off BBC managers about the flaws in the Panorama programme. In his letter, he wrote: “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.”

As Mr Prescott recounts, during an EGSC meeting on 12 May this year, Mr Munro insisted: “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 countered in his letter that this flew in the face of his grasp of BBC editorial policy on misleading edits. He pointed to the 2007 “Crowngate” case, where a trailer for a royal documentary was cut to imply the late Queen had stormed out of a photoshoot “in a huff”, as then-BBC One controller Peter Fincham described it to the press, even though the clips were jumbled out of order.

When pressed on the lack of a companion piece probing Ms Harris’s record, Mr Munro replied that it was not required “for due impartiality to have companion programmes”.

Ms Turness attempted to defend the doctored video and jumbled timeline by referencing a congressional committee, heavy with Democrats, that found Mr Trump part of a plot to subvert the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden. Mr Prescott dismissed this as “no justification for editing video clips so that a presidential candidate appears to say something he never did”.

At the EGSC meeting, neither the director-general nor the chairman weighed in on Mr Munro’s dismissal of Mr Grossman’s findings or Ms Turness’s backing of the edited clips, according to Mr Prescott.

So alarmed was Mr Prescott that he emailed the BBC chairman the following day: “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.”

Mr Shah never got back to him.

### What happens now?

In September, Mr Prescott reached out to every BBC Board member, voicing his frustration at the corporation’s habit of overlooking the Panorama mess and other bias alerts from recent years. Since then, his letter has reached government desks.

Opposition MPs might push Ms Nandy to kick off a probe. Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee could summon director-general Tim Davie, Mr Shah, and others to testify on the report’s claims, if it decides to act.

The “Crowngate” fallout saw the BBC order a review by ex-executive Will Wyatt. He found the trailer’s editing, handled by an outside firm, had been done in a “cavalier fashion”, with no intent to mislead about the then Queen. Still, Mr Fincham quit over it.

Mr Prescott has chosen not to comment.

A BBC spokesman responded: “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.”