BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage

JTA – The head of BBC and its top news executive have quit amid allegations that the network misled viewers in coverage of President Donald Trump and the Gaza war.

BBC Director General Tim Davie and Chief Executive of News Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday, 9 November, after a leaked report by Michael Prescott, a former standards advisor to the broadcaster, who accused it of anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias. The memo was published in the right-leaning British newspaper The Telegraph last week.

Prescott accused the BBC of selectively splicing footage of Trump’s speech to supporters on 6 January 2021 in an episode of its documentary show Panorama. He said the show patched together sections of the remarks to suggest that Trump said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”

These words came from two parts of the speech spoken almost an hour apart, omitting a part in which Trump said that he wanted supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. After Trump’s speech on 6 January, in which he said the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol.

Prescott’s memo noted, as United Kingdom (UK) media regulators recently did, that the BBC had failed to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official. It also cited “systemic problems within BBC Arabic” that were reflected in a rapid pace of corrections. Another contributor previously said on social media that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”. The network was also criticised for livestreaming a Glastonbury performance of punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF!”

The BBC has been scrutinised from all political sides over its coverage of Israel and Gaza. Presenter David Yelland called the resignations of Davie and Turness a “coup” by members of the BBC Board who had “systematically undermined” Davie’s team.

Some insiders have raised concerns about Prescott’s friendship with Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC Board who played a key role in Prescott’s appointment as BBC advisor, according to The Guardian. Gibb was director of communications for former UK Prime Minister Theresa May between 2017 and 2019.

Both Trump and the Israeli government applauded the resignations in social media statements.

Israel’s foreign ministry said Davie’s resignation “underscores the deep-seated bias that has long characterised the BBC’s coverage of Israel”, but said the problem wasn’t limited to the broadcaster.

“Far too many news outlets are promoting politics disguised as facts, amplifying Hamas’s fake campaigns,” it tweeted. “The time has come for real accountability to restore integrity, fair, and factual journalism.”

The chairperson of the BBC Board, Samir Shah, was expected to apologise for the editing of Trump’s speech, in a move meant to blunt potential damage to the UK-United States relationship.