BBC’s editing guidelines can remain unaltered in wake of Trump edit, review says

The BBC’s editing guidelines do not need to be altered in the wake of controversy surrounding the edit of a Donald Trump speech, a review has found.

The US president is seeking up to 10 billion dollars (£7.5 billion) in damages in response to the BBC’s editing of a speech he made before the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The scandal unfolded earlier this year after a leaked memo, written by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee, highlighted concerns that the speech had been selectively edited.

Following an initial review of the Prescott report in October, the BBC’s director of editorial complaints and reviews, Peter Johnston, conducted a more detailed review of the Panorama programme, Trump: A Second Chance?.

In his report, published on Friday, Mr Johnston said: “I was asked to look at the editorial guidelines on use of editing. I do not believe any changes are required, but we will ensure these lessons are reinforced.”

The BBC’s current editorial guidelines on editing state: “For news, factual and some factual entertainment content, unless clearly signalled to the audience or using reconstructions, content makers should not normally… Inter-cut shots and sequences if the resulting juxtaposition of material leads to a materially misleading impression of events.”

In the Panorama programme, a clip from Mr Trump’s speech on January 6 2021 was spliced to show him saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

Mr Johnston also said: “More actions had been taken than acknowledged in Michael Prescott’s document and since this was made public we have also dealt with some remaining issues.”

He added: “The key unresolved issue in the document was the editing of President Trump’s January 6th speech in the Panorama programme.

“This has now been publicly acknowledged as an error of judgment and it has been made clear that the edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”

A separate review of the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) outlined areas the BBC would “fix” including an effort to make the EGSC “more strategic – focused on major areas of current and emerging editorial risk.”

The BBC will also “adopt a new approach so individual editorial queries are dealt with promptly at the right level in the organisation, and to ensure that potential systemic issues are considered for deeper editorial review.”

BBC chairman Samir Shah said: “These are important reviews, and I am grateful to the authors for the speed and care they have taken in producing them.

“Along with the BBC Board, I am now ensuring immediate changes are made to the EGSC to ensure swift, appropriate and transparent action is taken to address editorial issues as effectively as possible, whenever they occur.”