The answer was ready for publication. After angry headlines in a British newspaper accusing the BBC of institutional bias over misleading editing of President Donald Trump’s speech, senior executives at the British public broadcaster realized they needed to act quickly.
On day four, the day after the first article appeared online, they were ready to issue a statement approved by the BBC’s main communications team and director general, Tim Davie.
The statement acknowledges that Panorama, the network’s flagship investigative program, made a mistake by collecting excerpts from Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, shortly before the attack on the Capitol.
To their frustration, the BBC’s board banned executives, including news director Deborah Torres, according to four executives and another senior official with knowledge of the events. News executives and board members couldn’t agree: Should they focus on the editorial error or acknowledge the newsroom’s failures more broadly?
Instead of responding to the criticism, the BBC remained silent for seven days. In a vacuum, a flurry of headlines turned into a deluge of indisputable accusations that ended up sweeping the White House, with press secretary Carolyn Levitt declaring that the BBC was “100% fake news.”
By the time the network finally issued a statement, the scandal had already engulfed the company and led to the resignations of Diffie and Torness.
The story of the BBC’s plunge into one of the worst crises in its 103-year history may have centered on misleading editing of Trump’s remarks. But it was about something much bigger: a long-running debate, often led by the right, about radio’s alleged institutional bias.
The BBC has long been a proxy for the UK’s cultural battles and has faced increasingly intense political attacks, exposing the corporation to potential funding cuts and legal liability. Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion or more.
This account is based on public documents and interviews by The New York Times with nine current BBC executives and senior staff familiar with the developments, including an emergency board meeting on November 6. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly. The BBC declined to comment.
Battle on the board
The headline in the right-wing Daily Telegraph on November 3 was blunt: “Trump’s speech has been manipulated by the BBC.”
The report cited a letter from a former adviser to the BBC’s standards committee, Michael Prescott, outlining what he called “in relation to systemic issues in BBC coverage”, including edited panorama footage.
The next day, a parliamentary committee wrote to BBC chairman Samir Shah demanding answers.
As days passed without a response, parliamentarians raised their voices, requests for action multiplied, and the crisis dominated the news.
On November 6 at 5 p.m., 11 board members met for an emergency meeting. Many of them were angry about the delay and discussed how best to respond to the crisis, according to two BBC executives and a senior official with knowledge of the meeting.
During the meeting, Torrence urged the board to respond to accusations of institutional bias and wanted the statement to say there was no intent to deceive, the three officials said.
But one of the board’s most powerful voices, Robbie Gibb, disagreed, according to the three officials. He wanted the response to be broader and in a more contrite tone. The council’s four other political appointees, all appointed by Conservative governments, also opposed Torness’ proposed language.
When contacted, Gibb did not respond to a request for comment.
With a background in conservative media and politics, Gibb has long accused the BBC of left-wing bias. He was appointed to the board in 2021 by Conservative Boris Johnson, a long-time critic of the broadcaster and then prime minister. Jeb lobbied for an advisory role for Prescott, the author of the memo, according to two senior executives.
The three officials said that Tornes’ allies at the meeting were less coordinated. One board member did not attend the meeting because he was in Antarctica. Others had little experience in journalism and did not have the same voice. Of these members, who were appointed by a subsection of the council, one had journalistic experience, and the rest worked in areas such as finance, management, and energy.
The discussion ended in a deadlock. The Council had prevented BBC News from issuing a statement about BBC News. This weekend, Torness and Davey resigned.
Davie, exhausted by previous BBC scandals, was already looking forward to his departure and made only oblique reference to the controversy surrounding Trump in his resignation speech. “While this is not the only reason, the current controversy surrounding BBC News understandably contributed to my decision,” he wrote.
The turn was more direct. “I have made the difficult decision that it will no longer be my role to lead you in the collective vision we all have: the search for truth,” he wrote.
He added: “Although mistakes have been made, I want to make absolutely clear that recent allegations that BBC News has institutional bias are false.”
On Monday 10 November, a week after the first Telegraph article was published and a day after the resignation, the BBC issued a response.
In a letter to the parliamentary committee, Shah apologized for the BBC’s “error of judgement” in editing the video. Without directly addressing accusations of institutional bias, he said the BBC had “produced thousands of hours of exceptional journalism” and that “it is important to maintain a sense of perspective”.
Edition
Editing video clips to shorten the length of a story is standard practice in television journalism, but it is a basic principle to ensure that such cuts are not misleading.
Trump spoke for 70 minutes. The final edit, led by veteran BBC producer Matthew Hill, combined the early parts of the speech with a clip after 54 minutes, condensing them into a 12-second clip. “Let’s get down to the Capitol” and “I’ll be there with you” combined with “And we fought. We fought like hell.”
This suggests a direct link between Trump’s words and the attack on the Capitol. The editing problem went undetected by others on the team, under the supervision of experienced software editor Karen Whiteman.
The BBC and Whitman declined to comment. Hill did not respond to a request for comment. “There was no intention to deceive,” BBC News said in a statement issued on November 10. “This sequence was intended to convey the key messages of the speech in a condensed format.”
This was not the first time Panorama faced criticism for doctored images. On the other side of the political spectrum, the BBC quietly admitted in 2022 that a Panorama article investigating anti-Semitism within the Labor Party, broadcast three years earlier, had misleadingly edited an interview.
The documentary about January 6th – “Trump: A Second Chance?” – Attracted little attention when it aired in October 2024.
Later that year, Gibb commissioned an evaluation of the network’s coverage of the 2024 US election, according to two senior news executives. He chose BBC journalist David Grossman, a researcher at the Standards Commission, these executives said. When Grossman delivered his report in January 2025, he pointed to Trump’s misleading editing.
Prescott expressed his concerns at a subsequent Standards Committee meeting with BBC News executives, according to Shah’s letter to Parliament. Executives told him that the issue had been raised with Panorama employees, who had defended their journalism, according to two senior news executives. No official action has been taken.
Prescott’s contract expired in June 2025 and was not extended, according to BBC officials with knowledge of the matter, and Prescott sent his memo, unsolicited, to the board months after his departure. It was this document that was later leaked to The Telegraph.
The memo said Trump’s documentary “was not balanced or impartial.” The BBC was also accused of showing systemic bias in its coverage of the US elections, issues related to ethnic diversity, the war between Israel and Hamas and transgender rights.
Prescott declined to comment for this story, but wrote in the memo that his views on the BBC “do not come with any political agenda.”
Shah later criticized the memo in his letter to the parliamentary committee, saying it did not provide a “complete picture” of the situation. He said the BBC had already addressed many of the issues raised by Prescott, including restructuring BBC Arabic to strengthen editorial oversight and, in other cases, issuing corrections or taking disciplinary action.
But he acknowledged that with regard to Panorama’s complaint, “it would have been better to take more formal action.”
‘Culturally captured’
Eight months before joining the board, Gibb wrote a column in The Telegraph in which he did not state his views on the broadcaster.
“The BBC has become culturally captive to the ‘woke’ thinking of some of its staff,” he wrote. “There is a pattern of left-leaning attitudes from a largely urban workforce from a similar socio-economic background.”
But he also defended the BBC. In a 2020 interview, he said the broadcaster was worth the investment, citing profits generated from its extensive entertainment and news operations and speaking in favor of the license fee paid by British families.
Two days after his resignation, Davie, who began his career at the BBC two decades ago in the marketing department, addressed the general meeting.
Davey, dressed in a dark suit and, as usual, without a tie, tried to calm and rally the team. He said he was “extremely proud” of the company, according to the BBC, and noted the “difficult times” it had faced in the past. He said: “You can ask questions such as: Where is the BBC heading? Are we adrift? What about the future?”
He added: “I would say this is a difficult time for the BBC.” “We will get through this.”
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