The BBC has long been accused of left-wing bias. However, the revelation that it doctored comments made by President Donald Trump to make it appear falsely that he promoted the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, takes this to a very different level.
An explosive memo surfaced last week in The Telegraph. The memo was written by Michael Prescott, who until June 2025 was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC). He was utterly appalled at the nature and scale of the BBC’s biased, misleading, and untruthful reporting that had been reported to the standards committee but had been brushed aside by BBC executives.
The flagship TV current affairs program Panorama, he said, had spliced together two clips from separate parts of Trump’s speech on January 6 to make it appear falsely that he had exhorted his supporters to go down and fight on Capitol Hill. Panorama reported his comments thus:
“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 anymore.”
What Trump actually said was:
“And after this, we’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down. Anyone 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 gonna 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.”
“And we fight. We fight like hell” came 54 minutes later.
The “speech” clip was followed by video footage of the Proud Boys, Trump’s supporters, marching toward Congress. This created the impression that these supporters had taken up his “call to arms” that wasn’t. In fact, the Proud Boys had marched to Capitol Hill before Trump had started speaking.
This wasn’t just bias. It was journalistic fraud. Yet when challenged about this, Jonathan Munro, global director of BBC News, said: “It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short-form clips.”
What a marmalade dropper. Editors often splice comments together for reasons of space and clarity. It is most certainly not normal practice to do so in a way that distorts or reverses the meaning.
