The director general of the BBC, Tim Davie, and the executive chairman of BBC News, Deborah Turness, resigned this Saturday following a report targeting US President Donald Trump.
“It’s a sad day for the BBC”, said the president of the British public broadcaster, Samir Shah, stressing that “Tim has been an excellent director general over the last five years”, but faced “persistent pressure that led him to make this decision”.
In recent days, the BBC has found itself at the center of a controversy, accused of having misleadingly presented the US President’s statements in a documentary on the information program Panorama”, broadcast in October 2024.
The British Minister of Culture, Lisa Nandy, considered the case “extremely serious”, and the president of the BBC, Samir Shah, was called to provide clarifications before a parliamentary committee on Monday.
In the message to the company’s employees announcing his decision to resign, broadcast by the BBC, Davie acknowledged that “the current debate surrounding BBC information contributed to the decision”.
“While the BBC works well overall, mistakes have been made and ultimately the director-general must take responsibility,” he added.
BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness, who also resigned, explained in a letter to staff that “the current controversy surrounding the Panorama report on President Trump has reached a point where it is damaging to the BBC.”
The case, revealed on Tuesday by the conservative newspaper “The Daily Telegraph”, concerns a documentary broadcast a week before the American presidential elections on November 5, 2024.
Case dates back to the invasion of the Capitol
The BBC is accused of having edited different parts of a speech by Donald Trump dated January 6, 2021 – the day hundreds of supporters invaded the Capitol – insinuating that the US President told his supporters that he would walk with them to the Capitol to “fight like demons”.
However, in the original sentence, Trump said: “Let’s walk to the Capitol and let’s encourage our courageous senators and representatives in Congress.” The expression “fight like demons” actually corresponded to another passage.
Donald Trump then refused to recognize his defeat at the polls against Democrat Joe Biden.
Speaking to BBC News this morning, Lisa Nandy expressed concern about the BBC’s editorial decisions, which “do not always meet the highest standards”.
“This is not just about the Panorama program, although it is extremely serious, but about a series of very serious allegations, the most serious of which is the existence of systemic bias in the way difficult topics are dealt with by the BBC,” said the Culture Minister.
Quoted in the “Telegraph”, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt denounced a “deliberately dishonest” montage, criticizing “100% false information”.
The BBC was also criticized on October 17 by the British media regulator (Ofcom) for having “violated broadcasting rules” in a report in Gaza, in which the main narrator, a child, was the son of a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas.
Ofcom considered that the failure to specify this family relationship “constituted a source of substantial deception”.