BBC 'doctored' Trump speech, internal report reveals

BBC Panorama doctored Trump speech to suggest riot incitement, whistleblower memo reveals.

A 19-page internal dossier by former BBC standards adviser Michael Prescott accuses the October 2024 Panorama special Trump: A Second Chance? of splicing Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech to falsely imply he urged violence at the Capitol. The programme aired a week before the US 2024 election.

Panorama combined three clips into one sentence:

“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not gonna have a country any more.”

Foreboding music followed, then footage of flag-waving marchers—filmed before Trump spoke at noon.

Trump actually said:

“we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators... to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

The “fight like hell” line came 54 minutes later, about election integrity.

The edit “made the US president ‘say’ things [he] never actually said,” the memo states. No captions indicated splicing or timeline jumps. A police audio of “three hundred Proud Boys” heading to the Capitol was included, despite earlier BBC reporting they marched pre-speech.Prescott, who left the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee in June, warned executives the distortion risked trust: “Why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?”

Managers, including Jonathan Munro and Deborah Turness, “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards.” Chairman Samir Shah ignored Prescott’s email on the “very, very dangerous precedent.”The dossier, now in government hands, compares the case to the 2007 Crowngate scandal. It highlights 10 Trump critics versus one supporter in the programme, with no Harris equivalent.