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.”
Public trust
Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee Dame Caroline Dinenage said: “The proposed reforms announced today indicate that BBC has got the message about the need to deal with concerns about coverage more effectively.
“It’s vital for public trust that any red flags raised are addressed both promptly and transparently. There is also a welcome pledge to broadening the range of voices on the EGS committee and to considering any potential systemic issues when it comes to editorial standards.
“After an undoubtedly difficult few months, it’s important now that the BBC and its chair follows through on the commitment to getting its house in order, as it heads into what will be a vital year for the corporation’s future.”
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Trump invaded his capitol with a mob is upset that someone pointed out he invaded a capital with a mob.
But egged on by right wing UK press, ex MP’s and wanna be MP’s, in the old days that would be treasonous.
Here we go, another take. (not forgetting Epstein supposed to drop today).
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/the-weekly-constitutional/71916/donald-trump-v-bbc-battle-begins
True but that’s not the issue here. The BBC did wrong and played into his hands. They’ve admitted it and now they face a cataclysmic court case. I think the BBC has a robust legal case but they’ll probably have to do a deal. If they lose in court it could destroy them financially (and reputationally) while for Trump the risk is pretty much zero.
But Donald has since falsely accused them of using AI so they can countersue for one hundred trillion dollars.
Whatever you think about whether the BBC did wrong in the editing, it was strategically a bad idea to apologise, because that only seems to have encouraged Trump, as if the apology was taken as a sign of weakness.
It’s about time the BBC was not its own judge and jury.
One thing that unites the eye-swivelling right and the loony-left is a definition of “BBC bias” that means “anything I don’t agree with”. A genuinely unbiased broadcaster should upset both groups equally.
The real BBC bias is geographic and cultural, not political because it’s still determined to peddle an imaginary British monoculture centred on London. Even tokenistic content from the other regions and nations rarely escapes those regions and nations to confuse the poor folks in the rest of the UK.
The new charter should invert the whole organisation and fund the regions and nations first.
Good point.
‘the regions and nations’ or is it ‘the nations and regions’ is really a phrase you only hear from the BBC.
The subtext of it is that the non-England nations are sometimes given lip service as nations but are in most practical terms treated as equivalent to a region of England.
That’s the nature of a union, and the alternative to English regions is just England when it would be even harder to be distinctive alongside a single entity of 56m people. The only way to be a true nation is independence, and until that happens it’s better for the other nations to divide and rule the most dominant nation.