The BBC has had to apologise to the President of the United States for manipulating footage to give audiences the impression he said something that he did not say.
The gravity of this error was so enormous that it caused the resignation of the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, and the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davie. As well it should have done.
Never mind which President we’re talking about here (though it’s hard to imagine there’s much love for Trump in W1A) the fact remains that footage of his speech was doctored and audiences were lied to. We’re forever being told that we live in an era of fake news and disinformation, well here it is, folks!
The BBC has positioned itself as the ultimate arbiter of truth with its bizarre BBC Verify unit, which to my mind only ever raised the question: is the rest of the BBC not verified? In an update on its important work earlier this year, a statement said the initiative would be further rolled out to “separate fact from fake and to bring clarity on complex issues.”
In classic BBC-speak, we were told it will help audiences “know not just what we know, but how we know it.” The author of this statement? Deborah Turness. I admit it’s amusing to throw the BBC’s own quotes back at it while it squirms under unprecedented scrutiny, but since I doubt Have I Got News For You will crack any jokes about this that don’t have Trump as the punchline, you’ll have to indulge me.
Leaked memo: ‘profound concerns’
The crisis has erupted because of a leaked memo, written by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. Prescott left that role in the summer but did so with “profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC.”
We now know those concerns related to how seriously the BBC took allegations of bias, poor judgement, error and complaints.
Prescott’s memo is worth reading in full, not least because his admiration for much of the BBC’s output is clear. In it, he draws on other reports, including one by former BBC journalist David Grossman, to raise important questions about the BBC’s coverage of US politics, the Israel-Gaza war (an issue which has triggered an overhaul of BBC Arabic’s editorial output), trans issues (“…a surprisingly high number of stories about drag queens…”) and even the selection of stories for BBC push notifications, where an internal review of the 219 notifications sent to BBC app users in September 2023, found “just four were about the issues of illegal migrants and asylum seekers [and] of those, three centred on the poor conditions or mistreatment of migrants.” For context, Prescott points out that in the same month the BBC sent out 12 notifications about Russell Brand.
‘Right wing conspiracy’
The findings should give pause for thought at every level of the BBC, but efforts are now underway to distract from the issue by claiming sinister forces are behind the revelations; that it’s a right-wing conspiracy and that the motives of the BBC’s critics must be questioned.
This attitude is baffling, coming as it does from people who claim to love the BBC above all else. They of all people should recognise that a failure to take seriously the issues currently being laid bare would leave the institution vulnerable to further attacks and a potentially fatal erosion of trust.
It doesn’t take BBC Verify to point out that the funding model has run out of road in an era of choice and online streaming. Making the case for the continued existence of the BBC – in its current form, funded by the current system, has just got harder.
Those that would shield it from criticism could in fact hasten its demise.