ON Sunday, Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director General, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of News, announced their intention to quit over their failure to act on an internal finding that the current affairs programme Panorama spliced parts of Donald Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, and parts of other footage of that day, to suggest that Trump encouraged the storming of the Capitol.
These two resignations are insufficient. Dozens of employees were involved in the editing and covering it up, and are still denying it was wrong, and even claiming they are victims of a political conspiracy.
Nigel Farage’s call for ‘somebody with a record of coming in and turning companies and their cultures around’ is necessary but insufficient.
The first resignation should have been the Chair of the BBC’s Board, Samir Shah.
The Chair takes responsibility for the appointment and dismissal of the Director General. Presumably Shah was decisive in encouraging Davie to quit. Davie is the third successive DG to quit before he was pushed (following George Entwistle in 2012 and Tony Hall in 2020).
Davie was right to quit. Davie became DG in September 2020, a few months after Emily Maitlis opened an episode of Newsnight with a personal call for the resignation of the Prime Minister’s special adviser Dominic Cummings and (implicitly) the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson (for ‘his blind loyalty’). Davie said he needed to ‘get a grip of the situation’ and that the BBC ‘deserves strong leadership.’ He failed.
Shah should have quit with Davie. Shah admits, in rare questioning by a BBC correspondent, that ‘it would have been better to have acted earlier’ about Panorama’s misrepresentation of Trump’s speech (which dates to October 2024, a week before the US general election). ‘Who’ should have acted earlier? ‘But we didn’t.’ Who is ‘we’? The correspondent doesn’t press him on ‘we’ but he goes on to throw ‘the Board’ under the bus. But he chairs the Board!
Shah and the other Board members did not act soon enough.
Then there’s the dozens of ill-defined deputies, controllers, chiefs, and directors who should quit.
A new board should dismiss the executives who sit on the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. This is the group to which Michael Prescott, an external adviser, reported for three years, before resigning in June with ‘profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC’ as he stated to the Board when he expressed his ‘despair at inaction by the BBC Executive when issues come to light’.
Shah reassured Parliament’s Select Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport that the Board considered Prescott’s ‘memo’ on October 17, and that Shah subsequently met him. But Shah admits that nothing was done.
Shah attacks Prescott’s ‘memo’ as just ‘his personal account of the meetings at which he was present’, not ‘a full picture’, and reliant ‘upon research commissioned by the EGSC itself’. So what? That sounds conventional for an external adviser (an appointment I’ve often held).
Prescott complains that ‘the Executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all’.
Yet Shah told the Select Committee that claims that the BBC has tried to ‘bury’ the issues are ‘simply not true’.
Prescott criticised two executives in particular: Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s Senior Controller of News, and Deborah Turness, the Chief Executive of BBC News.
According to Prescott, at a meeting of the EGSC on May 12, Munro said: ‘There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.’
Turness ‘tried to justify the doctored video and mangled timeline of the day’ by citing a Democrat-packed Congressional committee that found Trump conspired to overturn the 2020 election.
Shah effectively endorses their excuses. In his submission to the Committee he said: ‘The EGSC also heard from BBC News that the purpose of editing the clip was to convey the message of the speech made by President Trump so that Panorama’s audience could better understand how it had been received by President Trump’s supporters.’
If Turness should go, Munro should go. Shah should have gone first, with Davie.
Dozens of their underlings should go too, starting with those responsible for other scandals in the dossier.
For instance, Shah admits ‘underlying problems – for example in the Arabic service or long form journalism’.
Shah doesn’t specify the ‘underlying problems’ in those two ‘examples,’ but the Daily Telegraph has already reported Prescott’s findings: the Arabic service intentionally minimised Israeli suffering and the Hamas invasion of Israel, and amplified Israel’s invasion of Gaza and Hamas’s claims. Over the last two years, the BBC publicly corrected the Arabic service twice per week.
Panorama is an example of ‘long form journalism’. It is BBC Television’s self-described ‘flagship’ current affairs programme. But Panorama is not alone in splicing content to mislead.
In 2007, a BBC trailer showed spliced footage to make the late Queen appear to leave a photo shoot in a ‘huff’. After the BBC Trust investigated, the BBC1 Controller resigned.
This year, Ofcom sanctioned the BBC (for the first time since 2009) for its failure to disclose that a boy who was the subject of a report on the war in Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, and placed by Hamas.
A few other examples of ‘long form’ disinformation are warranted because Shah fails to mention them:
* The BBC ‘LGBTQ desk’ refused stories from its own reporters that might reflect badly on trans-gender ideology. It also edited stories that its reporters had already posted, such as removing a paedophile’s history as a drag queen and organiser of a Pride march.
* One of the ‘facts’ that BBC Verify confirmed is that car insurance companies are racist – which BBC Verify later confirmed is false, with information available the whole time.
* The BBC relied on the Trades Union Congress for a claim that jobs held by ethnic minorities are becoming more ‘insecure’ than those held by whites.
* The BBC amplified a single poll claiming that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump in 2024.
After dismissing the editors, fact checkers and executives involved in those scandals, the BBC should dismiss the employees who are denying the scandals or blaming them on a political conspiracy.
Let’s start with Nick Robinson.
On Saturday’s episode of Today, BBC Radio 4’s self-described ‘flagship’ morning programme, Robinson said in prepared comments: ‘It’s clear that there is a genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes. There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation.’
That’s true, but Robinson’s attempt at whataboutery would be more credible if he were fixing the editorial standards.
Before you consider Saturday’s programme a mere ‘error’, which is the BBC’s admission of choice, consider that on Monday’s Today programme, Robinson blamed the two resignations to date on ‘a row in which the President of the United States denounced what he called “doctoring” of what he had said in a speech featured on a BBC Panorama programme’.
Here Robinson is suggesting that the doctoring is just a claim by an implacably biased critic.
Robinson is not the only BBC insider to claim a political coup. David Yelland, another presenter of programmes for R4, tweeted: ‘The fall of Tim Davie is a victory for populists, for a cabal of toxic plotters with links to the BBC board – who designed and executed a coup.’
John Simpson tweeted: ‘Tim Davie was one of the best [Director Generals] the BBC has had, and Deborah Turness was a brilliant head of news. Only the BBC’s enemies could possibly be glad they’ve resigned.’
Dozens of high-fliers need to leave the BBC, from Shah down to Robinson, before anybody can trust the Corporation again.
