Good morning. I was warned when I agreed to sit in on First Edition that sometimes your early Monday morning could get derailed by a big breaking news story. So imagine my face yesterday when it happened on my very first weekend, as the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and the head of BBC News, Deborah Turness, both resigned.
The decisions come in the wake of Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, describing the BBC as “100% fake news” over the way a speech by the US president was edited. A week of hostile rightwing media headlines – very clearly set out by Jamie Grierson in this piece – seems to have taken its toll at the top of the corporation. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy’s judgement will also no doubt be in the spotlight, having said, prior to his resignation, that she “retained confidence” in how Davie was handling the situation. Davie himself clearly didn’t agree.
