Just when the BBC should have been basking in its success at the record 12 million viewers who watched the Celebrity Traitors finale, the corporation has been brought to its knees. Tim Davie, BBC director general, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of news, resigned following a leaked memo concerning alleged bias in BBC programming.
The memo, written last May by Michael Prescott, then independent advisor to the BBC’s editorial standards committee, raised a number of concerns about alleged bias in the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues, and alleged anti-Israel bias in the BBC Arabic service.
But the key issue appears to have been in the editing of a 2024 Panorama documentary titled Trump: A Second Chance? In the documentary, two different sections from President Donald Trump’s speech on the day of the January 6 2021 riots had been spliced together into one clip, which could have led viewers to conclude that Trump was calling on protesters to carry out the riot. Trump is now threatening to sue the corporation.
