The BBC edited a speech made by President Donald Trump during the January 6, 2021, protest, according to a whistleblower memo viewed by The Telegraph.
A Panorama program called “Trump: A Second Chance,” was broadcast a week before the 2024 election and showcased a “doctored” video of Trump saying, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you, and we fight. We fight like [removed], and if you don’t fight like [removed], you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
Instead, Trump directed protesters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” Trump said in his speech. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
What the BBC aired was a spliced version of three separate statements.
The whistleblower memo, written by former independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) Michael Prescott, explained that when the errors were presented to the BBC, managers “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards.”
“Examining the charge that Trump had incited protesters to storm Capitol Hill, it turned out that Panorama had spliced together two clips from separate parts of his speech,” Prescott wrote in the memo. “This created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers.”
See the original video below:
