After allegations of manipulation related to a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump, the Director-General of the British broadcaster BBC, Tim Davie, has resigned. BBC News Director Deborah Turness will also step down, according to the broadcaster on Sunday night. It is said that the respected broadcaster deceptively edited parts of Trump’s notorious speech before the Capitol assault for a television documentary.
Davie and Turness announced their resignations a day before BBC chief Samir Shah was scheduled to appear before a parliamentary committee. Shah had also been contacted by Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy about the matter. He described the allegations against the broadcaster on BBC News on Sunday as “extremely serious.” Media reports indicated that an apology from the broadcaster was expected. The newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday that the BBC had edited parts of the speech delivered by Trump on January 6, 2021, before the assault on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, for its news program Panorama.
In the speech, given after his election defeat to former President Joe Biden, Trump claimed he had been cheated out of victory and told his supporters they should “fight like hell.” That same day, thousands of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington. In the unedited recording of the speech, Trump said at one point: “We will march to the Capitol and cheer on our brave senators and congressmen.” In a much later section of the speech, Trump stated, referring to the election results, that something had gone wrong, that it couldn’t be right, “and we are fighting, fighting like hell.”
In the BBC documentary, the two sentences were joined directly, reinforcing the impression that Trump had called on his supporters to storm the seat of the U.S. Congress. Because of his role in the Capitol assault, Trump was charged in 2023 with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and to defraud the United States, among other offenses. However, after Trump’s electoral victory on November 5, 2024, Special Counsel Jack Smith was forced to drop the criminal case against the right-wing populist.
The documentary, titled Trump: A Second Chance?, had aired just a week before the U.S. presidential election on November 5. A BBC spokesperson said Shah would provide a “detailed response” to the Parliament’s Culture and Media Committee on Monday. Minister Nandy said she was “confident” that the broadcaster’s leadership was “handling the matter with the seriousness it deserves.”
“It’s not just about the Panorama program,” the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport added, “but about a series of very serious allegations — the most serious of which is that there is a systemic bias in the BBC’s reporting on sensitive issues.”
