The BBC used “doctored video” of President Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech on the White House Ellipse and “mangled” the timeline of the day’s events in a documentary last year, according to a whistleblower report.
The damning 19-page report on “BBC bias,” obtained by the Telegraph, was authored by former Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) adviser Michael Prescott, who sent the dossier to the BBC’s governing board after his warnings about the misleading Trump documentary were “dismissed or ignored,” he claimed.
The documentary – “Trump: A Second Chance?” – aired on the BBC’s current events program, “Panorama,” last October and “materially misled viewers” by splicing together clips of Trump’s speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally to make it seem like he incited the riot at the US Capitol, according to Prescott.
The ex-standards adviser notes that the BBC aired footage of Trump appearing to tell rally-goers: “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.”
The clip was spliced together from three separate parts of Trump’s speech – with a nearly hour-long gap edited out to make it seem like one fluent sentence.
Trump’s actual remarks were: “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.”
The BBC edited out the president saying, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
About 54 minutes later in his speech, Trump said, “Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, I wanna thank you very much and they go off to some other life, but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
Prescott described the deceptive editing of the Trump documentary as “shocking.”
“This created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers,” he wrote.
The BBC program also made it appear as if members of the Proud Boys, an extremist right-wing group, were inspired to march toward the Capitol Building after Trump’s speech.
The footage the program used of the Proud Boys heading toward the Capitol, however, was taken before Trump’s address.
“It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it,” Prescott wrote. “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.”
A BBC spokesperson declined to comment on Prescott’s claims the network turned a blind eye to his concerns of bias ahead of the program’s airing.
“While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Post.
“Michael Prescott is a former adviser to a board committee where differing views and opinions of our coverage are routinely discussed and debated,” the spokesperson added.
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