BBC Chiefs Quit Over Editing of Trump Speech

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00:00Well this can all be traced back to a Panorama documentary which aired in October last year

00:04and during that program there were sections of Trump's 2021 speech which was given on the day of

00:11the post-election riot at the US Capitol. Sections of that speech were spliced together

00:17resulting in some allegations that the BBC misled viewers through its editing of that section.

00:23The documentary made Trump appear to say that his supporters should walk down the Capitol and

00:29fight like hell when in fact he said they should cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and

00:36women and the fight like hell remark was actually from a different part of the speech which came

00:40about 50 minutes later. So this is the event that seems to have pushed things over the edge and

00:46following that there was a report in the British Telegraph newspaper earlier this month. They

00:52published a leaked internal BBC memo that suggested the program had pushed together those two parts of

00:59the speech so that President Donald Trump appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots in

01:052021. That leaked memo came from Michael Prescott who was a former independent external advisor to the

01:13BBC's editorial standards committee and he had raised concerns about the documentary so there's been a lot

01:18of pressure building especially since that Telegraph report and the departing CEO of BBC News Deborah

01:25Turner she addressed that matter in her resignation she said the ongoing controversy around the documentary

01:32had reached a stage where it was actually causing damage to the BBC so she's really attributed her

01:38departure from the organization to that documentary. It's also been a difficult period for the BBC just talk

01:44us through some of the recent criticism that's been directed at the BBC. Yeah so Tim Davey took over as

01:50director general of the BBC in 2020 and since then it hasn't really been the easiest tenure particularly

01:56over recent months but Tim Davey was actually nicknamed Teflon Tim at one stage during his BBC career

02:03and that was because of his perceived ability really to weather storms and at least appear composed

02:09in public but in the last year things have really come to a head. He's faced scandals including the

02:15live broadcast of controversial comments by a musical duo Bob Villain at Glastonbury this year.

02:20There was also this year the finding that a BBC documentary on Gaza committed a serious breach of

02:26broadcasting rules by Ofcom due to a disclosure failure and going further back to last year there was

02:33the prosecution of the former highest paid BBC newsreader Hugh Edwards for possessing indecent

02:39images of children. I mean owing to all of this and some other difficult moments that have taken

02:44place since 2020 there are some arguing this morning that perhaps it was about time that Tim Davey resigned

02:51just given the turbulence that's been associated with his time in charge of the BBC. Yeah Tiwi just

02:56briefly the reaction from President Trump to these these resignations. Yeah well President Trump has

03:01acknowledged this on Truth Social this morning he's called those that have resigned dishonest people

03:08and he's also accused them of trying to influence a US presidential election and we've also heard some

03:15reaction from Caroline Levitt the US press secretary on social media this morning as well.