I’m glad the BBC has apologised to President Trump today about the editing of footage of his 6 January 2021 speech by its Panorama programme – rightly saying it gave “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”.
I’m equally glad the Corporation is resisting calls to shell out compensation. With threats of $1 billion in damages, we know who’d have to foot the bill – and Trump doesn’t need our money.
But despite the editorial failing we now know about, I was initially stumped last Sunday about why the revelations had led to resignations from Director General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness.
On the one hand, for the first time ever, I find myself agreeing with Trump. There’s no doubt in my mind that, as he told Fox News, his speech had been “butchered” in a way that “defrauded” viewers – and this seems shocking from such a trusted programme.
But the original mistake, albeit serious, seemed fixable. I’d have thought the Panorama editor might have resigned, placing the accountability firmly with the programme; and a corrected clip and apology could have contained the damage.
So why did Davie and Turness have to go?
The facts that have emerged during the week have made the answer clearer.
Firstly, while the Panorama footage editing was the most obvious wrongdoing, there have been claims of broader bias at the BBC – in its Arabic coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, for example, and its portrayal of trans issues. That said, the two outgoing leaders have rejected any suggestion of institutional bias, so they’re not taking the rap for that.
Secondly, it emerged yesterday that there was another offending edit of Trump’s January 2021 speech, two years before the Panorama programme aired.
A Newsnight programme in 2022 showed clips of Trump’s speech which were also misleadingly spliced together, followed by a voiceover from Kirsty Wark saying “and fight they did,” played over footage of the Capitol riots.
Thirdly – and most fatally for the two leaders, and damaging for the BBC – we’ve now heard that, instead of taking responsibility for the clear wrong-doing and making amends, the senior BBC figures firstly sat on the problems, hoping they would go unnoticed. And then, when they came to light, they tried vigorously to defend them internally.
In what have been reported as highly fractious internal meetings, they apparently grasped for procedural and technical excuses: the edits were standard practice, they didn’t materially alter the meaning, the programmes should stand by their journalistic independence, and so on.
The problem is there are no credible excuses for what happened, and trying to defend it closed off the quickest routes to resolution.
The moment the BBC leaders attempted to justify the programmes, it moved the issue from the realm of human error into the realm of integrity. What could have been correctable mistakes became a matter of trust and honesty – and that raised the stakes dramatically.
Inside the organisation, we hear the effect was equally corrosive. Most BBC journalists pride themselves on transparency and accuracy, and when the leadership failed to uphold those values, it eroded confidence. Staff can accept that mistakes happen, but cover-ups are another matter.
The resignations that followed, then, were not the inevitable consequence of a couple of flawed programme edits. They were the fallout from a futile attempt to deny accountability.
As with many corporate crises, refusing to get to grips with what had happened and trying to defend the indefensible amplified the problems – and the reputational damage – far beyond the original issues.
In the end, as in so many such cases, the BBC leaders weren’t undone by the original mistake. They were undone by their refusal to own it.
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