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BBC’s Newsnight has been accused of editing a Donald Trump speech in a way that made it appear that he made a more explicit call for violent protest ahead of the Capitol riots.
The corporation is already reeling from the resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of BBC News, Deborah Turness, which followed the splicing together of the same Trump speech in an edition of Panorama last year.
Trump has since filed a billion-dollar lawsuit in a Florida court, according to the White House. The BBC is considering how to respond to the legal claim.
The Telegraph said it had found an edition of Newsnight from 2022 which contained a splicing together of the speech in a similar way. It did not appear that the edit alerted viewers to the cut.
The Newsnight edit spliced together a section of Trump’s speech on the day of the riots, in January 2021, in which he urged supporters to walk to the Capitol building, with a later segment of the address in which he urged them to “fight like hell”.
A former White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, criticised the BBC on air at the time for splicing together the footage.
“Your video actually spliced together the presentation,” he said. “That line about ‘and we fight and fight like hell’ is actually later in the speech.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”
A similar edit was made in an edition of Panorama that was broadcast a week before the US election. The spliced clip suggested that Trump told the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
The words were taken from sections of his speech almost an hour apart.
Concerns about the Panorama cut were raised in a memo by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee. He left the role in the summer.
The memo drew on instances Prescott said showed a systemic bias at the BBC, something the corporation has denied.
Some in the BBC argue the Panorama edit did not change the meaning of the speech significantly, but others disagree. Samir Shah, the BBC’s chair, has since apologised and said the edit gave the impression “of a direct call for violent action”.
