One of those insanely annoying advertisements on Radio 4 for BBC Sounds the other day was voiced by an aggressive young man: “Fake news…we’re coming to get you…NOW”. It was, as usual, crass and vulgar; it was also wrong. Because it turns out that the BBC is not only a corrective to fake news but the creator of fake news.
The editing of a speech by Donald Trump for a Panorama programme to suggest that he actually incited violence after the election in October 2024 was quite extraordinarily damaging. It was also a wilful falsehood though the US president’s estimate that it was a billion dollars’ worth of damage may be pushing it. And it could really only have been perpetrated by the kind of people who think that if Donald Trump didn’t actually use words in the way in which they were spliced together, he was the sort of person who probably meant to do so. In other words, the perpetrators of the edit had a fixed idea of Donald Trump – a totemic baddy – and they edited his remarks to fit that perception. That’s not even unconscious bias; it’s a bias in which the BBC journalists probably took pride.
