Madrid, November 9 (European Press) –
The BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and its chief news officer, Deborah Torres, have resigned amid controversy over the broadcast of a fragmented speech by US President Donald Trump in which he appeared to explicitly encourage his supporters to storm the Capitol during the January 2021 raid on the North American legislature.
“The BBC is doing well, but some mistakes have been made, and as director-general, I must take ultimate responsibility,” Davie wrote in his farewell letter, which was published by the same British media.
Davie took up the role in September 2020, after serving as CEO of BBC Studios, leaving the network after 20 years of service.
Manipulating composition and pro-Palestinian bias
The Telegraph newspaper was responsible for exposing the controversy by publishing details of a leaked internal BBC memo indicating that the program had edited two parts of Trump’s speech with a manipulated message. The document was signed by Michael Prescott, a former independent outside counsel to the station’s Editorial Standards Committee, who left his position in June.
Trump’s original line, “We will march to the Capitol and we will cheer on our brave senators and congressmen,” was transformed, after passing through the Panorama documentary newsroom, into “We will march to the Capitol and I will be there with you. And we will fight. We will fight like devils,” and this was broadcast last year. There was a time lag of more than 50 minutes between the two sections of the speech that were edited together.
The memo also noted that the BBC Arabic Service was showing a pro-Palestinian bias during its coverage of the Gaza war and was deliberately “censoring” reactionary conservative voices in the gender identity debate in order to “treat the transgender experience without balance or objectivity as a celebration of diversity while ignoring the complexity of the issue.”
In his resignation letter, Torness wanted to take the opportunity to forcefully reject these latest accusations. “Although mistakes have been made, I want to make absolutely clear that the recent accusations that BBC News has institutional bias are false,” he said, before blaming what happened exclusively on the editing of Trump’s comments.
He concluded by saying: “The ongoing controversy surrounding President Trump’s Panorama program has reached the point where it is damaging the BBC, the institution that I love, and the responsibility lies with me.”
In the British government’s first institutional reaction, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Lisa Nandy thanked Davy for his years of service. “He has led the BBC through a period of great change and helped the organization meet the challenges it has faced in recent years,” Nandy wrote in a statement on his X account.
He added: “Now more than ever, the need for reliable news and high-quality programming is essential to our democratic and cultural life, and to our standing in the world.”
BBC Chairman Samir Shah expressed his regret at Davey’s resignation and called it a “sad day for the BBC”. In his comment to the network he runs, Shah said that he understood “the ongoing pressure that Davy is under, both personally and professionally, which has led him to make this decision today.”
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