The BBC has been accused of selectively editing a Donald Trump speech to make it appear clearer that he encouraged the US Capitol attack, according to a former external adviser to the corporation. Michael Prescott, who served as an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee (EGSC) until the summer, raised concerns in a memo about a Panorama special broadcast in October 2024.
The programme, titled Trump: A Second Chance?, spliced together clips from Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 to suggest he 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 almost an hour apart, omitting a passage where Trump urged supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.
The dossier, first reported by the Telegraph, claimed the editing made Trump “say things [he] never actually said”. It also noted that footage of marchers who appeared inspired by Trump was actually taken before the speech. Prescott said in his report: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that [Trump] did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.”
In a covering letter to the BBC board, Prescott reportedly said he was circulating the document out of “despair at inaction by the BBC executive when issues come to light”. A BBC spokesperson responded: “While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully. Michael Prescott is a former adviser to a board committee where differing views and opinions of our coverage are routinely discussed and debated.”
The incident risks inflaming the White House’s relationship with the BBC. The Trump administration has previously accused the corporation of bias, including wrongly claiming it removed a story about a fatal attack near a US-backed food distribution site in Gaza. Senior BBC journalists have dismissed such claims as point-scoring.
