BBC Doctored Trump Speech, Internal Report Reveals

 

The “mangled” footage was highlighted in a 19-page dossier on BBC bias, which was compiled by a recent member of the corporation’s standards committee and is now circulating in Government departments.

The dossier said the programme made the US President “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” by splicing together footage from the start of his speech with something he said nearly an hour later.

It claimed senior executives and the BBC’s chairman had ignored and dismissed a string of serious complaints raised by the corporation’s own standards watchdog.

The Telegraph will soon publish other excerpts of the memo, which accuse the BBC’s Arabic service of bias over its coverage of the war in Gaza, and accuse the corporation of “effective censorship” of its coverage of the transgender debate.

The document raises serious questions about the culture at the BBC, how it affects impartiality and how managers including Tim Davie, the Director-General, are accused of turning a blind eye to evidence of bias.

The most damaging disclosures involve a one-hour Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? that was broadcast in October last year.

As well as altering Mr Trump’s words, the documentary also showed flag-waving men marching on the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6th 2021 after the President spoke, which “created the impression Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call to arms’”. In fact the footage, was shot before Mr Trump had even started speaking.

The report said Panorama’s “distortion of the day’s events” was so egregious that viewers would ask: “Why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?”

When the issue was raised with managers, they “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards”. The report’s author then warned Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, of the “very, very dangerous precedent” set by Panorama but received no reply.

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

Worth reading in full.

The Telegraph has printed the text of an internal memo sent to BBC managers:

The spliced together version of Trump’s comments aired by Panorama made it seem that he said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be 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.”

In reality, the first part of Trump’s speech: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you,” came 15 minutes into the speech. The second half of the sentence that was aired by Panorama, “and we fight. We fight like hell…” came 54 minutes later.

Fifteen minutes into the speech, Trump actually said: “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that he 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.

That was not the end of Panorama’s distortion of the day’s events.

On January 6th 2021, the so-called Proud Boys, Trump’s supporters, marched to Capitol Hill before Trump started speaking.

Source

Featured image source, Trump: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-promised-join-capitol-march-but-slipped-away-by-car-2021-1

Featured image source, Panorama: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5srnn91SY0N9QKFK6dk7Hk0/contact-us

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