The BBC is in dire straits.
The BBC is a state-funded enterprise in much the same way that NPR is a state-funded enterprise. The BBC has been the dominant broadcast platform in the United Kingdom for decades, going all the way back to World War II.
For the last several decades, they have just been a left-wing agitprop organization. But now they are absolutely falling apart thanks to their extraordinarily dishonest attacks on President Trump.
According to The Wall Street Journal:
President Trump has threatened to file a $ 1 billion lawsuit against the BBC over the way the U.K. state broadcaster edited one of his speeches in a documentary last year. BBC Chairman Samir Shah apologized Monday for the controversy, which has plunged the broadcaster into crisis. The apology came a day after BBC Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News Chief Executive Deborah Turness said they were leaving the organization following criticism from the White House.
What happened? There was an episode from the BBC’s flagship investigative series called Panorama, which ran one week before the 2024 United States election.
You may ask, did that affect the election? It doesn’t matter. The job of the BBC is to cover the news, not make the news up.
One week before the election, they ran a piece in which they spliced together things that President Trump said on January 6, 2021, to make it look as though he himself personally was leading an armed insurrection at the Capitol building.
That was not true.
In order to achieve this effect, they had to cut out 24 pages of material. They cut from one part of the speech, and then they fast-forwarded 50 minutes and cut together the last part of the speech to clip them together, and then basically put in ellipses in order to make it seem as though President Trump himself was personally calling on people to follow him to the Capitol building and to assault the Capitol building.
If you watch that original clip, they had a music bed underneath, which connected the first part of the statement to the last part of the statement. It is not as though they had some sort of interpolation from a narrator explaining that much later in the speech, President Trump made the second part of the statement.
The Journal continued:
According to a letter from Trump’s lawyers, the BBC faces a legal claim for at least $1 billion unless the documentary is retracted, an apology published and compensation paid to the president. The letter set a deadline of Friday. The broadcaster said in a statement that it would “respond in due course.”
This follows hard on a 19-page memo that was put out by a top staffer at the BBC named Michael Prescott. He was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, and he wrote a 19-page memo pushing the idea that the BBC had become a biased and ridiculous organization. He wrote:
Dear Board Members,
You may know that I have been one of the two independent external advisers working alongside the EGSC. I held this role for three years and stood down in the summer.
I departed with profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC. Since leaving, I have thought long and hard about what, if anything, to do about this.
My conclusion is that these concerns are serious enough for me to draw them to your attention, in your oversight role of the BBC.
What follows is a summary of what were, in my view, some of the most troubling matters to come before the EGSC during my term.
My view is 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.
Prescott pointed out that there was tremendous bias with regard to the U.S. election. He specifically pointed out that edit in the Panorama program. He said, “This was one of the most shocking sets of issues uncovered during my time with the EGSC. If BBC journalists are to be allowed to edit video in order to make people ‘say’ things they never actually said, then what value are the Corporation’s guidelines, why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?”
And yet top members of the staff 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.”
These kinds of shenanigans occurred repeatedly. They did this with comments that President Trump made about Liz Cheney. There are reports in which the BBC routinely ignored its own guidelines, giving excessive coverage, for example, to that rogue Iowa poll that suggested that Kamala Harris was going to win the state by a substantial margin. Of course, President Trump won the state pretty easily.
“During my time as an advisor to the EGSC it became clear the BBC fell too easily for putting out ill-researched material that suggested issues of racism when there were none,” Prescott wrote. Then he listed chapter and verse across the BBC in which they basically manufactured a bunch of racial issues where no racial issue existed.
They went out of their way to promote idiocies about biological sex and gender. Prescott noted:
I was told that time and time again the LGBTQ desk staffers would decline to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans-debate. The allegation made to me was stark: that the desk had been captured by a small group of people promoting the Stonewall view of the debate and keeping other perspectives off-air. Individual programmes had come to lack their own reporters as a counterweight. …
There was also a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity. … There’s a constant drip feed of one sided stories, usually news features celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity.
One example of this might be a report that happened in 2024 from the BBC, in which they reported that male breast milk was just as nutritious for babies as female breast milk. You may be asking yourself, what is male breast milk? The answer is that if you pump men full of estrogen, you will get some secretions from the nipples that are not actually like female breast milk.
But the BBC had an interest in pretending that males can become females. And so they ran with this report.
This is what the BBC is. It’s true on a wide variety of issues.
It’s particularly true about the Hamas-Israel war. According to the UK Telegraph, the BBC was forced to correct two stories every single week about the Gaza conflict since the October 7 attacks on Israel.
That’s insane. How many stories can you retract before you finally lose all credibility? BBC Arabic had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate, or misleading.
The BBC despises Israel, and it’s not possible for them to make it any clearer. For example, in November 2023, BBC editor Jeremy Bowen falsely reported that Israel had blown up the Al Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip.
That wasn’t true. He later admitted he got it wrong, but said he didn’t feel bad at all that he got it wrong, saying, “I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think, I think I was measured throughout. I didn’t race to judgment.”
Interviewer: “But you said that the building had been flattened.”
Bowen replied, “Oh, yeah. Well, I got that wrong because I was looking at the pictures and like, what I could see was a square that appeared to be flaming on all sides. And there was a, you know, sort of a void in the middle. And it was, I think it was a picture taken from a drone. And so, you know, we have to piece together what we see. And I thought, ‘Well, that looks like the whole building’s gone.’ And that was my conclusion from looking at the pictures. And I was wrong on that. But I don’t feel too bad about that.”
It doesn’t feel bad at all, because this is the way the BBC operates. They start with the conclusion, and then they backfill the news in order to reach that particular conclusion.
So, is it any surprise that the BBC is a disaster area or that they’re in serious trouble now?
It is long past time for the BBC to admit what it is, which is an agitprop organization on behalf of the political Left. They have been for decades. Nothing has changed.
And this latest brouhaha is just more evidence that the government should not be subsidizing media organizations such as NPR, PBS, or the BBC in Britain, because you wind up with left-wing media sponsored by taxpayers.