Whistleblower Claims BBC Doctored Trump Footage to Skew Jan. 6 Coverage

A stunning memo from a BBC whistleblower has revealed that the British broadcaster deliberately altered footage of President Donald Trump to make it appear as though he incited the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021. The manipulated video was aired on Panorama in a program titled “Trump: A Second Chance,” just one week before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

According to the internal memo obtained by the Telegraph, the broadcast stitched together portions of Trump’s speech in a way that falsely suggested he urged violence. The edited clip made it seem that Trump said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”

In reality, Trump’s full remarks painted a very different picture. He said: “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.

“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. … I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

The whistleblower, Michael Prescott, a journalist who spent three years advising the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, accused the network of covering up the manipulation and refusing to admit wrongdoing. “The news outlet’s managers refused to accept there had been a breach of standards,” Prescott wrote in his explosive memo.

He said he personally warned BBC chairman Samir Shah of the “very, very dangerous precedent” being set by the Panorama program but never received a response.

In his letter accompanying the report, Prescott described his departure from the advisory role in June as the result of persistent ethical failures inside the organization. “I departed [from the advisory role] with profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC … my view is that the Executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all.”

Prescott singled out two senior executives — Jonathan Munro, the senior controller of news content, and Deborah Turness, chief executive of BBC News — for what he called their culture of denial and defensiveness. “I have been surprised at just how defensive Deborah and Jonathan in particular have been whenever issues are raised,” he wrote.

He concluded that systemic problems within the BBC’s leadership allow serious editorial breaches to go unaddressed. “Firm and transparent action plans to prevent the re-occurrence of problems are in short supply – and so, as you can see, errors are repeated time and again,” Prescott warned.

The revelations have sparked outrage over the BBC’s credibility, raising troubling questions about political interference and journalistic integrity at one of the world’s most influential news institutions.

{Matzav.com}