The BBC has been accused of selectively editing a Donald Trump speech to make it appear clearer that he encouraged the US Capitol attack, according to a former external adviser to the corporation.
An episode of Panorama, aired a week before the US election, spliced together clips of a Trump speech from January 6, 2021. The edited clip suggested that Trump told the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
The words were taken from sections of his speech nearly an hour apart. It did not include a section where Trump said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Concerns about the editing were raised in a memo by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee (EGSC). He left the role in the summer.
The dossier, first reported by the Telegraph, stated the program made Trump “'say' things [he] never actually said” by cutting together footage.
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The complaints relate to an hour-long Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? broadcast in October 2024. The memo also complained that footage of marchers, who seemed to have been inspired by Trump, was actually taken before the speech was made.
In a covering letter to the dossier, which he sent to the BBC’s board, Prescott reportedly said he was circulating the document out of “despair at inaction by the BBC executive when issues come to light.”
Prescott said in his report: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that [Trump] 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.”
Prescott has been contacted for comment.
A BBC spokesperson said: “While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully. Michael Prescott is a former adviser to a board committee where differing views and opinions of our coverage are routinely discussed and debated.”
The incident risks inflaming the White House’s relationship with the BBC. The Trump administration has previously wrongly accused the BBC of removing a story about a fatal attack near a US-backed food distribution site in Gaza.
Senior BBC journalists said the White House was point-scoring after Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the corporation of taking “the word of Hamas with total truth.”
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