Thanks for this Ian. Hugely necessary. Couldn't believe the tenor of the coverage on BBC Breakfast this morning. The usual molehill mountaineering. No one does self-flagellation like the BBC. They gave Kelvin McFuckingKenzie some airtime. Seem to have a death-wish.
I hate it, but also, when was the last time any of the BBC's accusers performed any similar kind of introspection? This alone shows why the Beeb is worth protecting.
In this case, the Mail, the Telegraph, Boris and co. But generally people use the Beeb as a scapegoat-cum-punching bag. Do I wish they were less accommodating to Nige? Of course. Do I think they're the main driver of Reform's popularity? Of course not.
I dunno... It's like the argument that Have I Got News For You made Boris PM, or The Apprentice put Trump in the White House. They definitely had an effect, but these guys are (evil) charisma machines. People will be drawn to them with or without the broadcast exposure.
Yes, absolutely fair enough. Agree with Ben Gould's point, too. For me it's a question of degree. Absolutely should be introspection and reporting on the corporation's failings: and you're both right that it separates the BBC from its competitors. But it was off the scale this morning. Surely should have learned by now that they will never satisfy the ghouls who want to see the corporation destroyed.
The BBC’s tendency towards navel-gazing is probably its least attractive characteristic. BBC journalists seem to think everyone is as obsessed with the BBC as the rightwing press is (we’re not), or they think they have to go really over the top on self-criticism to show they take it seriously. Either way, the BBC has no sense of proportion when it comes to reporting on itself.
I find the latest ongoing saga concerning the BBC has triggered some powerful emotions in me…anyone else?
1 Curiosity…oh dear what’s Auntie done now?
2 Upon investigation…raw anger at the casual, careless stupidity of some anonymous film makers critically endangering a priceless & irreplaceable reputation earned over 100 years. Maybe after reading your take this is harsh.
3 Further rage at the hypocrisy & commercial cynicism of the politicians & media organisations leading the attack.
4 A weird pride & admiration that there are still people in public life sufficiently untainted by shamelessness to take responsibility & resign in recognition of the seriousness of what has happened & to give one of our greatest institutions the best chance of reforming & moving forward.
5 A certainty that THIS is where we pitch camp & fight. If Murdoch, the Mail & Johnson keep coming at our Auntie after its recognition of error, contrition & almost noble sacrifice…then no more memes & moaning…we take to the streets to defend her.
Don't hold your breath on (5). Unfortunately BBC News' long-standing craven cowardice in the face of right-wing attacks has led to plenty of left-liberal people more or less giving up on it. Feels like that great line at the end of Seven: "A fine place worth fighting for? I agree with the second part"
We’re much better off with the BBC than without it; the possibility of something far worse filling the vacuum is enough reason to be fighting to save it. The BBC garners enormous respect and soft power around the world for the UK. https://stoptrump.org.uk/petition-bbc/
I’m in our local watching England v All Blacks. It’s half time & someone mentioned Trump & Auntie & there were cries of ‘British Bullshit Corporation’ & ‘I lost faith in them years ago’ & ‘They deserve it’ & ‘I watch GB News.’
I’m well aware that a Northampton* boozer does not necessarily contain a representative sample but make no mistake…if those of us who love & value Auntie & all her flaws want to preserve her…we’re going to have to fight.
Driver Andy
*perfect spot for wildly misleading & unreliable TV news vox pops always taken mid morning, mid week….😀
And yet this has been well known for some time; the packing of the BBC board with Johnson acolytes, yet Starmer has been in for a for a year and appears to ignore the problem completely. For 10 years people have been screaming about the constant portrayal of right-wing figures like Farage on question time, the promotion of Tory Laura as political editor, nauseatingly fawning over Johnson while he was in office yet nothing is done about it and is still not being done about it.
What with this and the failure to address the dark money coming into UK politics this government is losing a massive opportunity to at least try and redress the balance. Unless they do something bloody quickly it will be too late if it isn't already.
Exactly my thoughts. It is indeed too late. Money and power worldwide are winning at the expense of basic human values.
Some white supremacists are already saying that Hitler should have finished the job. Sorry if I am going off at a tangent but somehow all these issues are linked.
As the left finds itself neutered we are watching the beginnings of a perfect storm.
Absolutely, on every level the right are being allowed to set the agenda and get people removed who stand up to them. It's sick and very dangerous. We desperately need to fight it
It was undoubtedly a very ill-judged use of a quilt quotation by the BBC from that Trump speech.
That said, although Trump was never charged with inciting insurrection, special counsel Jack Smith's final report released by the DoJ barely a week before Trump's inauguration makes it very clear that he believed that had Trump not won the election he would have been able to land these charges against him.
The fact that Trump is now busy issuing pardons to Rudy Giuliani and others involved in the plot to create a slate of fake electors to subvert the 2020 election shows that he recognises their culpability and by extension his own.
Fox News made a substantial settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for repeating Trump's lies about the 2020 election - more evidence of his culpability.
Trump and the Republicans are trying to re-write history and are launching bitter, vindictive prosecutions in the United States to expunge the record of Trump's misdeeds. It is shameful that we are allowing something similar to happen here.
Without doubt Panorama *needlessly* fucked up! They didn't need that edit. Trump, clearly, incited the Jan6 storming of The Capitol. It didn't need dodgy edits to prove that. But to use that as proof of "institutional bias" is pure bollocks.
I have a confession... I've pretty much given up on BBC News - because, yes: *they are biased*... They are more inclined to favour the right wing. I've complained several times about the over-generous platforming of Farage/Reform. And what do I get in response? "The coverage of Reform/Farage is based on their popularity." Yeah? Well... Dear BBC: If you stop fucking platforming them, they won't be so popular!
It looks like we are on a one-way-street. Complain as much as you like about right-wing bias: nothing. But some stupid edit, (which accurately reflected what happened), that can be called out as a political agenda, and they're in headless-fucking-chicken "off with their heads" mode.
What on earth is Nandy doing? I realise the BBC board appoint the DG etc, and Sunak handily stuck a stooge in there as Chair before being booted out, alongside Gibb etc. But it needs higher level reform - complete re-set and politically neutral appointments set into the Charter. It does actually matter that the BBC does not become GB News.
Thank you for articulating my feelings so eloquently, Ian. This whole affair has made me profoundly angry, but it's the hypocrisy and double standards that particularly rankle.
Apparently the company which made the Trump documentary are currently working on a programme about Nigel Farage. It strikes me that one of the aims of this current attack on the BBC, particularly when we consider its timing, is to spike that programme.
These are very dark times for the BBC and for democratically accountable journalism. It’s very worrying that we’re not yet seeing any robust pushback to the right-wing assault on the only broadcasting institution with any pretence either to neutrality or, frankly, any kind of nuanced, quality journalism.
Thanks, Ian, for your contribution, even if it only seems like a scream into the void.
The BBC is what GBNews always liked think it could be, the National channel. The BBC is officially impartial but it isn’t, not when it can be bullied and influenced by politicians. I’m angry that politicians with no conscience have done this to a British institution like the BBC but I still need the actual news and have turned to other sources of journalism and paid extra for it. Journalists who work independently for less money reporting the actual news is what I care about most. Like Doctors who work for the NHS.
May seem a bit knee-jerk but, in general, If Trump, Farage, the Telegraph or Mail are for a thing then I'm likely to be against it...
On the BBC, they've not done great work on their news coverage of late and their view has been skewed, but I'd rather have that 100 times than a fraction more GBeebies or Fuax News.
At the heart of it all lies a single, glorious irony. The BBC is being torn apart for “misleadingly editing” a Donald Trump speech. Donald Trump, a man independently verified as having made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first term, according to The Washington Post, and whose statements are rated 76 per cent “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFact. In other words, Britain is losing its mind over a network accused of editing a liar inaccurately.
Trump, naturally, called the resignations “a great victory for truth.” This from a man who treats facts like single-use plastics. The papers ran with it, of course. Nothing unites Fleet Street faster than the opportunity to worship at the altar of moral panic.
Once, the BBC was more than a broadcaster. It was a member of the family. It spoke in the corner of the room and somehow made the world make sense. It raised us with documentaries, corrected us with the news, and forgave us with comedy. Its voice was patient, curious, occasionally pompous, but always ours.
Everyone seems to be accepting at face value the criticism of the Panorama edit as it is presented without questioning its merit. The fact is that the criticism itself involves cherry picking and distortion to a greater extent than the edit being criticised.
There are two parts to the accusation:
1) That "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" was from a different part of the speech (54 minutes apart) to "And we fight. We fight like hell."
2) The "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" bit was immediately followed by the entirely benign "and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women"
Concerning the second point, that is in itself cherry picking to make what Trump was saying far more benign than it actually was. For a start it is deliberately cut off mid sentence when the full sentence was: "we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them." But placed in the broader context of the statements before and after that sentence, the underlying tone is far from benign:
"Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It's like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we're going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn't, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you're sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
It's true that this early part of the speech was more benign than the closing part of the speech, including reference to "peacefully and patriotically", but the closing remarks 54 minutes later (54 minutes of increasing buildup) do not include any such benign words.
But what people are missing is that while it is true that the specific words "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" were taken from that relatively benign early part of the speech, the closing remarks also refer to walking down to the Capitol, just two sentences away "And we fight. We fight like hell". The closing remarks in full:
"I think one of our great achievements will be election security. Because nobody until I came along had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9 o'clock in the evening and say I want to thank you very much, and they go off to some other life. But I said something's wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country. And I say this despite all that's happened. The best is yet to come. So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give. The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God Bless America. Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you."
It is quite explicit here that "We fight like hell" and "we're going to the Capitol" are used together and are indeed intended to be received together. Thus the splicing used in the Panorama edit does not alter the meaning of the message being presented, and hence does not mislead. Panorama could have chosen to quote directly from the closing section, without any splicing, presenting the same message. It appears they took the "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" from the early part of the speech simply because it was more coherent and less rambling than the very similar wording that occurs adjacent to "And we fight. We fight like hell."
Ian is right that the edit should have been done in a way such that it was clear that there was a cut. But the presentation of the extent to which the cut misleads the public is far more distorting than the cut itself.
The clear and proper answer is to prosecute Gibb (and others?) for misconduct in public office.
There is a fairly solid case just on the neglect of their duty to provide proper balance, for example with regards to Gaza or the constant platforming of the Farage Party, but if there is truth in the claim that he's been actively sabotaging the institution, them that raises the game by an order of magnitude.
The BBC has just handed populists exactly the narrative they wanted. The problem isn’t whether Trump’s behaviour can be exposed — it’s that poor editorial choices now make it look like his supporters were right about media bias.
At a time when trust in institutions is fragile, the BBC cannot afford to make “own goals” like this. Accountability in journalism matters, because it shapes the public’s faith in facts themselves.
I see your critique fails to mention consistent lack of balance from the 'LGBTQ+ editorial team' with respect to gender identity & women's sex based rights. Consumers of BBC content on these issues were misled & fed a particular POV ..... inconsistent with a publicly funded news organisation.
Thanks for this Ian. Hugely necessary. Couldn't believe the tenor of the coverage on BBC Breakfast this morning. The usual molehill mountaineering. No one does self-flagellation like the BBC. They gave Kelvin McFuckingKenzie some airtime. Seem to have a death-wish.
I hate it, but also, when was the last time any of the BBC's accusers performed any similar kind of introspection? This alone shows why the Beeb is worth protecting.
Which accusers do you mean there?
The righteous ones who accuse them of platforming Farage or the far right ones who complain that it's too left wing?
In this case, the Mail, the Telegraph, Boris and co. But generally people use the Beeb as a scapegoat-cum-punching bag. Do I wish they were less accommodating to Nige? Of course. Do I think they're the main driver of Reform's popularity? Of course not.
Eew what disgusting phraseology in sentence two, apologies.
Maybe not the main driver, but certainly a significant one.
I dunno... It's like the argument that Have I Got News For You made Boris PM, or The Apprentice put Trump in the White House. They definitely had an effect, but these guys are (evil) charisma machines. People will be drawn to them with or without the broadcast exposure.
To be fair though this is part of what makes the BBC unique - even if it feels self-defeating.
Yes, absolutely fair enough. Agree with Ben Gould's point, too. For me it's a question of degree. Absolutely should be introspection and reporting on the corporation's failings: and you're both right that it separates the BBC from its competitors. But it was off the scale this morning. Surely should have learned by now that they will never satisfy the ghouls who want to see the corporation destroyed.
The BBC’s tendency towards navel-gazing is probably its least attractive characteristic. BBC journalists seem to think everyone is as obsessed with the BBC as the rightwing press is (we’re not), or they think they have to go really over the top on self-criticism to show they take it seriously. Either way, the BBC has no sense of proportion when it comes to reporting on itself.
Thanks for this Ian.
I find the latest ongoing saga concerning the BBC has triggered some powerful emotions in me…anyone else?
1 Curiosity…oh dear what’s Auntie done now?
2 Upon investigation…raw anger at the casual, careless stupidity of some anonymous film makers critically endangering a priceless & irreplaceable reputation earned over 100 years. Maybe after reading your take this is harsh.
3 Further rage at the hypocrisy & commercial cynicism of the politicians & media organisations leading the attack.
4 A weird pride & admiration that there are still people in public life sufficiently untainted by shamelessness to take responsibility & resign in recognition of the seriousness of what has happened & to give one of our greatest institutions the best chance of reforming & moving forward.
5 A certainty that THIS is where we pitch camp & fight. If Murdoch, the Mail & Johnson keep coming at our Auntie after its recognition of error, contrition & almost noble sacrifice…then no more memes & moaning…we take to the streets to defend her.
Don't hold your breath on (5). Unfortunately BBC News' long-standing craven cowardice in the face of right-wing attacks has led to plenty of left-liberal people more or less giving up on it. Feels like that great line at the end of Seven: "A fine place worth fighting for? I agree with the second part"
We’re much better off with the BBC than without it; the possibility of something far worse filling the vacuum is enough reason to be fighting to save it. The BBC garners enormous respect and soft power around the world for the UK. https://stoptrump.org.uk/petition-bbc/
Further to this….
I’m in our local watching England v All Blacks. It’s half time & someone mentioned Trump & Auntie & there were cries of ‘British Bullshit Corporation’ & ‘I lost faith in them years ago’ & ‘They deserve it’ & ‘I watch GB News.’
I’m well aware that a Northampton* boozer does not necessarily contain a representative sample but make no mistake…if those of us who love & value Auntie & all her flaws want to preserve her…we’re going to have to fight.
Driver Andy
*perfect spot for wildly misleading & unreliable TV news vox pops always taken mid morning, mid week….😀
And yet this has been well known for some time; the packing of the BBC board with Johnson acolytes, yet Starmer has been in for a for a year and appears to ignore the problem completely. For 10 years people have been screaming about the constant portrayal of right-wing figures like Farage on question time, the promotion of Tory Laura as political editor, nauseatingly fawning over Johnson while he was in office yet nothing is done about it and is still not being done about it.
What with this and the failure to address the dark money coming into UK politics this government is losing a massive opportunity to at least try and redress the balance. Unless they do something bloody quickly it will be too late if it isn't already.
Exactly my thoughts. It is indeed too late. Money and power worldwide are winning at the expense of basic human values.
Some white supremacists are already saying that Hitler should have finished the job. Sorry if I am going off at a tangent but somehow all these issues are linked.
As the left finds itself neutered we are watching the beginnings of a perfect storm.
Absolutely, on every level the right are being allowed to set the agenda and get people removed who stand up to them. It's sick and very dangerous. We desperately need to fight it
It was undoubtedly a very ill-judged use of a quilt quotation by the BBC from that Trump speech.
That said, although Trump was never charged with inciting insurrection, special counsel Jack Smith's final report released by the DoJ barely a week before Trump's inauguration makes it very clear that he believed that had Trump not won the election he would have been able to land these charges against him.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/6f4df207-e97f-4cd7-9a21-9aed8804a530.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_2
The fact that Trump is now busy issuing pardons to Rudy Giuliani and others involved in the plot to create a slate of fake electors to subvert the 2020 election shows that he recognises their culpability and by extension his own.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-giuliani-pardon-fake-electors-b2861891.html
Fox News made a substantial settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for repeating Trump's lies about the 2020 election - more evidence of his culpability.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/18/fox-dominion-settle-us-defamation-lawsuit
Trump and the Republicans are trying to re-write history and are launching bitter, vindictive prosecutions in the United States to expunge the record of Trump's misdeeds. It is shameful that we are allowing something similar to happen here.
Absolutely bang on Ian.
Without doubt Panorama *needlessly* fucked up! They didn't need that edit. Trump, clearly, incited the Jan6 storming of The Capitol. It didn't need dodgy edits to prove that. But to use that as proof of "institutional bias" is pure bollocks.
I have a confession... I've pretty much given up on BBC News - because, yes: *they are biased*... They are more inclined to favour the right wing. I've complained several times about the over-generous platforming of Farage/Reform. And what do I get in response? "The coverage of Reform/Farage is based on their popularity." Yeah? Well... Dear BBC: If you stop fucking platforming them, they won't be so popular!
It looks like we are on a one-way-street. Complain as much as you like about right-wing bias: nothing. But some stupid edit, (which accurately reflected what happened), that can be called out as a political agenda, and they're in headless-fucking-chicken "off with their heads" mode.
Apologies for mixed metaphors!
What on earth is Nandy doing? I realise the BBC board appoint the DG etc, and Sunak handily stuck a stooge in there as Chair before being booted out, alongside Gibb etc. But it needs higher level reform - complete re-set and politically neutral appointments set into the Charter. It does actually matter that the BBC does not become GB News.
Thank you for articulating my feelings so eloquently, Ian. This whole affair has made me profoundly angry, but it's the hypocrisy and double standards that particularly rankle.
Apparently the company which made the Trump documentary are currently working on a programme about Nigel Farage. It strikes me that one of the aims of this current attack on the BBC, particularly when we consider its timing, is to spike that programme.
These are very dark times for the BBC and for democratically accountable journalism. It’s very worrying that we’re not yet seeing any robust pushback to the right-wing assault on the only broadcasting institution with any pretence either to neutrality or, frankly, any kind of nuanced, quality journalism.
Thanks, Ian, for your contribution, even if it only seems like a scream into the void.
The BBC is what GBNews always liked think it could be, the National channel. The BBC is officially impartial but it isn’t, not when it can be bullied and influenced by politicians. I’m angry that politicians with no conscience have done this to a British institution like the BBC but I still need the actual news and have turned to other sources of journalism and paid extra for it. Journalists who work independently for less money reporting the actual news is what I care about most. Like Doctors who work for the NHS.
May seem a bit knee-jerk but, in general, If Trump, Farage, the Telegraph or Mail are for a thing then I'm likely to be against it...
On the BBC, they've not done great work on their news coverage of late and their view has been skewed, but I'd rather have that 100 times than a fraction more GBeebies or Fuax News.
I would have thought Starmer ought to clear out this board, and put in a new one. Make James Purnell DG and John Major chairman maybe?
At the heart of it all lies a single, glorious irony. The BBC is being torn apart for “misleadingly editing” a Donald Trump speech. Donald Trump, a man independently verified as having made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first term, according to The Washington Post, and whose statements are rated 76 per cent “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFact. In other words, Britain is losing its mind over a network accused of editing a liar inaccurately.
Trump, naturally, called the resignations “a great victory for truth.” This from a man who treats facts like single-use plastics. The papers ran with it, of course. Nothing unites Fleet Street faster than the opportunity to worship at the altar of moral panic.
‘Britain’ isn’t losing its mind over this; only the right wing press, politicians, and the right wing Brexit Bunch at the top of the BBC are.
Once, the BBC was more than a broadcaster. It was a member of the family. It spoke in the corner of the room and somehow made the world make sense. It raised us with documentaries, corrected us with the news, and forgave us with comedy. Its voice was patient, curious, occasionally pompous, but always ours.
https://satiricalplanet.substack.com/p/the-corporation-captured-political
Great article!
Thank you.
Everyone seems to be accepting at face value the criticism of the Panorama edit as it is presented without questioning its merit. The fact is that the criticism itself involves cherry picking and distortion to a greater extent than the edit being criticised.
There are two parts to the accusation:
1) That "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" was from a different part of the speech (54 minutes apart) to "And we fight. We fight like hell."
2) The "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" bit was immediately followed by the entirely benign "and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women"
Concerning the second point, that is in itself cherry picking to make what Trump was saying far more benign than it actually was. For a start it is deliberately cut off mid sentence when the full sentence was: "we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them." But placed in the broader context of the statements before and after that sentence, the underlying tone is far from benign:
"Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It's like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we're going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn't, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you're sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
It's true that this early part of the speech was more benign than the closing part of the speech, including reference to "peacefully and patriotically", but the closing remarks 54 minutes later (54 minutes of increasing buildup) do not include any such benign words.
But what people are missing is that while it is true that the specific words "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" were taken from that relatively benign early part of the speech, the closing remarks also refer to walking down to the Capitol, just two sentences away "And we fight. We fight like hell". The closing remarks in full:
"I think one of our great achievements will be election security. Because nobody until I came along had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9 o'clock in the evening and say I want to thank you very much, and they go off to some other life. But I said something's wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country. And I say this despite all that's happened. The best is yet to come. So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give. The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God Bless America. Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you."
It is quite explicit here that "We fight like hell" and "we're going to the Capitol" are used together and are indeed intended to be received together. Thus the splicing used in the Panorama edit does not alter the meaning of the message being presented, and hence does not mislead. Panorama could have chosen to quote directly from the closing section, without any splicing, presenting the same message. It appears they took the "We're going to walk down to the Capitol" from the early part of the speech simply because it was more coherent and less rambling than the very similar wording that occurs adjacent to "And we fight. We fight like hell."
Ian is right that the edit should have been done in a way such that it was clear that there was a cut. But the presentation of the extent to which the cut misleads the public is far more distorting than the cut itself.
The clear and proper answer is to prosecute Gibb (and others?) for misconduct in public office.
There is a fairly solid case just on the neglect of their duty to provide proper balance, for example with regards to Gaza or the constant platforming of the Farage Party, but if there is truth in the claim that he's been actively sabotaging the institution, them that raises the game by an order of magnitude.
The BBC has just handed populists exactly the narrative they wanted. The problem isn’t whether Trump’s behaviour can be exposed — it’s that poor editorial choices now make it look like his supporters were right about media bias.
At a time when trust in institutions is fragile, the BBC cannot afford to make “own goals” like this. Accountability in journalism matters, because it shapes the public’s faith in facts themselves.
The four-time convicted criminal —
now believed to be a paedophile or closely connected to one —
marks a breaking point for the BBC.
Nobody wants their licence-fee money funding a man like that.
There should be no talk of compensation.
Let him sue.
The White House has no proof the programme was ever broadcast in America,
and Florida law holds no jurisdiction here.
If even a single penny is paid, that’s it — game over.
The public won’t stand for it.
Licence fees will dry up,
and there won’t be enough prison cells to hold everyone who refuses to pay.
The insiders and high-paid journalists who’ve protected this system for years
will lose everything —
and the BBC will finally collapse under the weight of its own corruption.
And if Donald Trump or his GB News followers think he could bring down the BBC —
they’re deluding themselves.
Trump is already in a precarious position:
panicking, holding Situation Room meetings and private briefings —
not to serve the people who voted for him,
not to deal with global issues,
but to strategise on how to protect himself from what’s about to be released.
I see your critique fails to mention consistent lack of balance from the 'LGBTQ+ editorial team' with respect to gender identity & women's sex based rights. Consumers of BBC content on these issues were misled & fed a particular POV ..... inconsistent with a publicly funded news organisation.