Report: BBC Expected to Apologize After Using Doctored Footage of Trump’s Jan. 6 Speech In Documentary
In a move expected this coming Monday, BBC chairman Samir Shah is set to apologize before the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee for using an edited version of Donald J. Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 address in its documentary. According to the Telegraph, the BBC acknowledges that viewers were misled by the way clips from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally were combined in the October-aired program.
The apology follows the publication of a comprehensive 19-page report by Michael Prescott, previously the BBC’s adviser on Editorial Guidelines and Standards. In it, Prescott alleges pervasive bias within the broadcaster and claims he issued warnings in May about the manipulated nature of the speech used.
Central to Prescott’s complaint is what he describes as the BBC’s “mangling” of Trump’s remarks in the documentary titled Panorama: “Trump: A Second Chance?” The whistleblower asserts that the network edited together multiple distinct parts of the rally to make it appear that the president urged the crowd to storm the Capitol.
One highlighted moment: footage was shown of Trump saying: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
In reality, the speech was cut. Trump originally stated: “We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one of you but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressman and women.” The documentary omitted his words: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Further scrutiny found that what the BBC presented as a continuous sentence was actually stitched together from three separate portions of Trump’s speech with nearly an hour’s gap edited out, thereby altering context. Prescott calls this manipulative editing “shocking.”
He writes: “This created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers.”
Another major allegation contends that the program linked Trump’s rally to an advance by the Proud Boys toward the U.S. Capitol. The footage used, however, predates the speech itself—yet the documentary treated it as if the crowd was inspired by Trump’s remarks.
“It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it,” Prescott adds. “The fact that [Mr. Trump] did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.”
{Matzav.com}
