Two top leaders at the BBC resigned on Sunday amid an escalating scandal over impartiality and bias that plunged Britain’s public broadcaster into one of its biggest crises in recent years.
The BBC’s most senior executive, director general Tim Davie, and the chief executive of the news division, Deborah Turness, both quit after the leak of a deeply critical memo that, among other things, revealed that the BBC had misleadingly edited a speech by Donald Trump to make it appear that he had directly called for violence on January 6.
Naughty CNN! Trump did indeed say to ‘we fight like hell’ as you can see in the full transcript on news sites that haven’t surrendered yet, such as AP: Transcript of Trump’s speech at rally before US Capitol riot | AP News
Any one hour documentary pretty much has to edit that rambling dumpster fire of a speech. The BBC’s main mistake was not to make the edit clearer.
This was probably worth an apology. Was it worth the leader resigning? Probably not. The right-wing media succeeds in hunting another witch. I hope it backfires and Labour appoint someone further left.
Here’s what he said with more of the transcript, since everyone seems to be afraid of anything larger than 5 second sound bites:
That sounds like encouraging a riot to me.
Sounds like? It is and it did incite a riot.
It was an egregious distortion, similar to the one which forced the resignation of the Controller of BBC One in 2007.
How can you tell? It looks like a bad edit. This is not like the 2007 incident of editing things out of order to fake someone leaving an appointment angrily, then making an indiscreet comment on the faked event.
It shunted together two paragraphs in Trump’s speech that were 50 minutes apart to make it sound like he explicitly told people to attack congress. There’s no editorial justification for that.