By Roz Morris, Managing Director TV News London Ltd
Personally, I think the best comment I have heard about the BBC’s Panorama ‘mistake’ came from veteran broadcaster, Libby Purves, now a Times columnist and the first woman to present the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4.
She told listeners to Times Radio that she and her husband, Paul Heiney, also a BBC veteran, were both ‘viscerally shocked’ by the revelation in the leaked report by whistleblower Michael Prescott.
This revealed that the BBC’s flagship investigative programme ‘Panorama’ had misrepresented Donald Trump’s speech last January at the time of the riots at the Capitol by editing together two statements he made nearly an hour apart and so making it appear that he had directly encouraged violence when he did not.
Libby Purves’s reaction to this news was the same as I had with my husband Malcolm Douglas, who works with me at TV News London providing media training and PR advice. I’m a former BBC and ITV news reporter and presenter and Malcolm is a former ITV News senior producer. Both of us have spent our whole careers in news journalism and media training and we were genuinely surprised by how very shocked we were that the BBC has been shown to be lying about Donald Trump.
We just couldn’t believe it. And we still can’t. And another thing we still can’t believe is that no-one has been sacked from the production team that considered it was OK to do this and to broadcast it.
They have done a very bad thing by lying and damaging trust in the BBC’s news and current affairs reporting and they have brought the BBC into disrepute in the UK and across the world.
Just look online and you can find reports from many countries about this BBC ‘mistake’.
But this wasn’t a mistake.
It’s a lie and it’s not journalism. It’s propaganda. It is not consistent with anyone’s journalistic values let alone the BBC’s. Plus, I think most people would agree that apart from being wrong it was also stupid. You don’t need to exaggerate or misrepresent Donald Trump, to put him in a bad light if you disagree with him. He provides lots of evidence all by himself.
Surely putting out this programme is grounds for dismissal from a staff job, like for example Editor of Panorama, and also a decision that the production company that made the edition of Panorama entitled Trump: A Second Chance? broadcast on 28 October 2024, should never be used again by the BBC?
We have heard nothing about this, but we have heard a lot about how the BBC is under fire from ‘a right wing coup’ and the continuing description of the Trump edit as ‘a mistake’.
We know that the DG and the Head of News and Current Affairs have resigned after the leaked report was published and it was revealed they had sat on it for several months and done nothing.
However, astonishingly, Tim Davie made no apology for the Panorama lying broadcast in his resignation statement on 9th November. His resignation letter to staff reads as though leaving the BBC was just something he was going to do anyway. You can read it in full here.
Deborah Turness as Head of News was more specific . She wrote to her staff :
‘I have taken the difficult decision that it will no longer be my role to lead you in the collective vision that we all have: to pursue the truth with no agenda.
‘The ongoing controversy around the Panorama on President Trump has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC – an institution that I love. As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me – and I took the decision to offer my resignation to the Director-General last night.
‘In public life leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down. While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.’
But pursuing the truth with no agenda is exactly what the leaked Prescott Report asserts that the BBC is not doing. Whether on Trump, Gaza or trans issues.
On 13th November, the BBC’s chairman Samir Shah sent an apology to President Trump after his threat to sue had been received. According to the BBC website, the corporation said the edit had given “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. The BBC will not show the programme again.
The apology came hours after a second similarly edited clip broadcast on Newsnight in 2022, was revealed by the Daily Telegraph. Exclusive: BBC Newsnight also edited Trump speech
Interestingly, the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, backed the BBC but also told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the BBC’s editorial standards and guidelines were “in some cases not robust enough and in other cases not consistently applied”, adding that there would need to be people “at a very senior level with a journalistic background”.
There are a lot of questions still unanswered about this BBC scandal.
These include:
Can the BBC licence fee survive in its present universal format?
Will President Trump now sue the BBC for millions of pounds?
Will anyone be sacked for signing off the Panorama programme?
Is the BBC still using the production company that made the Trump programme with Panorama?
Will anything change in terms of improved ethical standards in BBC News and Current Affairs? and
If BBC Panorama lied to us about Trump, what else have they lied to us about?
I think it is fair to say that the BBC has let down the people of Britain, who pay for it and up until now have trusted it. The BBC asks questions of other people all the time. They now need to question themselves – thoroughly and without bias.
As we journalists say: this story has legs and it will run and run.
