Splicing and dicing the BBC's reputation

Questions about bias at the BBC are missing the point

Recently, I have been reminded of a quote:

You can become so single-minded in the defence of your own principles that you forget to follow them.

I first heard those words spoken by Joe Turner, a (fictional) CIA agent, describing treachery amongst his bosses. It came to mind during the past week when watching members of the BBC board giving evidence to a parliamentary Select Committee about events behind the current crisis at the BBC.

Source: Parliament Live TV

To those of us outside the BBC, the position is pretty straightforward. In a 2024 Panorama documentary, the BBC edited together three extracts from President Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 (the day of the Capitol riots) in such a way that the broadcast extract gave a wholly misleading impression of what Trump had actually said. This was not a case of those who don’t support Trump and those who do having a different take on his words. The BBC’s edit was a blatant distortion. (A reminder of the edit is below.)

But the BBC did not address this mistake for what it was: a misreporting of what was actually said (at best, unreliable – at worst, deceptively misleading). Instead, they decided to indulge in yet another of their seemingly endless internal debates over bias and impartiality. By trying to hold the line on “bias”, they completely lost sight of objective truth.

The BBC drives itself down this road over and over again. As former press regulator, Jonathan Heawood, has written:

[P]art of the problem for the BBC is the impossible ideal of journalistic impartiality, which suggests that (1) every story has two sides; (2) those two sides are equally weighted; (3) there is a neutral point between these two sides; and (4) it is possible for journalists to occupy this neutral point. None of these things is true. It is possible, however, for journalists to be reasonably objective.

The statutory obligation on the BBC to show “due impartiality” in news broadcasts is imposed equally on all broadcasters. But we don’t see the other TV companies repeatedly tying themselves up in the same knots of impartiality. There is an additional, ethical obligation on the BBC which derives from the fact that it is funded by the public. But the UK has many services that are publicly funded and yet those in charge don’t have such public displays of anguish when things don’t go as they should. And let’s face it, there are many public services that are broken in today’s UK.

The BBC likes to cast itself as a paragon of quality and impartiality. And it is quick to treat criticism as an attack on one of its ideals. In the current case, the BBC’s determination to cast criticism of Panorama as a debate over bias resulted in months of paralysis followed by convulsions from the boardroom to the news studios.

The programme at the heart of the dispute had been broadcast in 2024, one week before the US Presidential Election. When the claim of deception was brought to the attention of the BBC’s Editorial Guidance and Standards Committee (“EGSC”) in January 2025, they did not take decisive action. They asked for the matter to be investigated.

According to the evidence of the BBC’s Chair at the Select Committee, the result of the investigation was reported back to the EGSC in May. But still they didn’t take action.

The matter was discussed again in November, following which both the Director General and the head of the News division resigned from their posts. More than a year after the original broadcast, the BBC Chair finally issued an apology for the blatant deception, although he downplayed it as an “error of judgement”.

It has been reported that the head of the News division had wanted to issue an apology much earlier, but had been stopped by the board. This suggested yet more indecisiveness on the part of those at the top. But as we learned from the BBC’s evidence to the Select Committee, the board had objected to the News division’s proposed apology because of its total inadequacy. The News division thought the edit “was justified, but it should have been a more transparent edit” (by incorporating a broadcast equivalent of the three dots used in written media to denote an edit). The Select Committee was told that the News division “continued to maintain that actually the impression given, despite the edit, was correct”.

So, let’s take a look at the edit. Around 20% of the way into his speech, Trump said (with emphasis added by me):

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to 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. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

This passage contains a lot of walking and a fair bit of showing strength. But the objective in this section, as articulated by Trump, is quite clearly “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

And then, some 8,000 words and more than 50 minutes later, he said the words below. This time, he made a call to “fight like hell”, followed by more walking so that, on arrival at the Capitol, they could “try and give [Republican colleagues] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”. This is what he said (again with emphasis added by me):

And again, most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I want to thank you very much, and they go off to some other life. But I said something’s wrong here, something is really wrong, can’t¹ have happened. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country. And I say this despite all that’s happened. The best is yet to come. So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give. The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

In citing these two extracts, I have used bold text to highlight eight passages that I consider to be a reflection of the 300+ words I am quoting. The BBC took just three of those eight passages and spliced them together, changing the order of two of them, to produce the following, which was broadcast as if it were a single unedited extract spoken by Trump:

We’re going to 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 going to have a country anymore.

This was blatantly misleading. If anyone had been asked before the riots occurred whether they thought Trump had just called for this crowd to start a physical fight at the end of their walk he had asked them to take, I don’t believe they would have said that he did.

But we know what happened next. Many of the crowd took the walk. Trump was not, in fact, with them. On arrival, the crowd did not make their voices heard “peacefully and patriotically”. Nor did they behave in a manner intended to give senators a sense of “pride and boldness”. Instead, the crowd rioted and scared the bejesus out of their elected representatives (and everyone else inside the Capitol building – several of whom died). For some time, whilst this was going on, Trump remained silent.

For those who wanted to present a documentary showing Trump’s connection to the riots, it’s not a difficult stretch to suggest that the sections of his speech in which he claimed that the election had been stolen from him might have played a part – a big part, even – in fuelling anger before the march started. Nor is it unreasonable to argue that silence from Trump during the riot might have encouraged the rioters to believe that he wanted them to continue and also that a call for calm might have quelled their behaviour. But Trump’s silence wasn’t on camera.

I don’t know what happened inside the documentary maker’s studio in 2024, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, at the planning phase, they had just assumed that they would be able to insert a suitable quote at the appropriate juncture of the film, showing Trump calling for violence. After all, four years had gone by in which people frequently referred to Trump fomenting the riot. But finding a quote of the type they were looking for proved as easy as finding a Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk said, “Beam me up, Scotty”. It was not possible.

I know that I have made a comparable error on many occasions when I have been planning an article. The urge is to develop the piece and leave the sources to last. But if I find that a quote I had intended to cite doesn’t actually exist in the form that I remember it, I have to change what I have written. The BBC didn’t. They diced and spliced what Trump actually said in order to manufacture what they needed him to have said for their story.

And then they became so single-minded in the defence of their impartiality that I believe they became biased about what they had done to the point that they couldn’t see it for what it was.

1. The Associated Press’s written transcript records Trump as saying “can”, but this video suggests that he actually said “can’t”.