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.
The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday after a leaked report by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser 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 Jan. 6, 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 he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” After Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, in which he said the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol.
Prescott’s memo accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimize Israeli suffering” to “paint Israel as the aggressor” in Gaza. The BBC previously faced backlash over failing to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official, along with using a contributor who said on social media that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did.” The network was also criticized for livestreaming a Glastonbury performance of the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
The BBC has been scrutinized 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 adviser, according to The Guardian. Gibb was the director of communications for former Conservative 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 was not 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 chair of the BBC Board, Samir Shah, is expected to apologize for the editing of Trump’s speech on Monday, in a move meant to blunt potential damage to the U.K.-U.S. relationship.
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