Why BBC Panorama did not mislead the public on Trump

At 6pm last night, BBC Online reported: “BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit.”

The documentary is, of course, the suddenly much-vilified BBC Panorama one hour special “Trump a Second Chance?”, transmitted a year ago on the eve of the 2024 presidential election.

Not for the first time the BBC, regrettably, has shot itself in the foot.

Had the BBC said Tim Davie was resigning over the accumulation of issues that has plagued the Corporation in recent months – notably some of its Gaza coverage, its seemingly unreformable Arabic Service, even some (but certainly not all) of the allegations in a leaked dossier  by Michael Prescott, the former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee –  I could have understood.

But for the BBC to follow its many adversaries by pinning the blame for the DG’s resignation on Panorama makes no sense at all.

To recap: Panorama spliced together two bits of Trump’s 70-minute speech on the National Mall, near the White House in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, shortly before the murderous riot on Capitol Hill.

The first clip (some 20 minutes into Trump’s speech) said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you…….”

That was joined seamlessly to a 2nd clip some 50 minutes later “….and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”

Not included in the edit were Trumps words” I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

To be clear: this edit should not have happened in the way that it did.

The fact there had been an edit should have been clearly signalled — and it was not.

Unusually, this was a Panorama without a reporter, so there was no commentary. But that was no justification for not marking — in some way, shape or form — a break between the two clips: for example, by time-stamping them both with some pictures in between.

But was the edit “materially misleading”, as Prescott, the Daily Telegraph (which broke the story), the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Daily Mail and a multitude of other BBC bashers have insisted?

On the bald facts, the charge “materially misled” is itself manifestly materially misleading.

And grossly hypocritical.

Johnson, the Mail and the Telegraph – including its Associate Editor Gordon Raynor, who’s been leading the Telegraph’s assault on the BBC —have short memories.

Here was the Telegraph’s own Chief Reporter Robert Mendick, on 7 January: Trump, he wrote, “threw on the whole, messy heap a burning match. And throughout the day he kept throwing on more. A clenched fist, and a call for action.”

Here was the former Prime Minister as quoted in the Telegraph on 8 January: “BORIS JOHNSON has ‘unreservedly condemned’ Donald Trump for encouraging protesters [my emphasis] who stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC. The Prime Minister said the US president had been ‘completely wrong’ to cast doubt on the outcome of the election and to encourage the ‘disgraceful’ behaviour that resulted in four deaths…”

Also, the Telegraph’s own columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on 8 January: “The putsch has failed….the desecration of Capitol Hill by Trump mobs — on explicit incitement by the president [again, my emphasis] — speaks for itself.”

Again, the Telegraph’s own Ben Riley-Smith on 13 January referred to Trump’s “incendiary speech to supporters” prior to the “mob that stormed the US Capitol last week.”

Riley-Smith went on to specifically make the link that his bosses, Boris Johnson, the Daily Mail and others have conveniently forgotten in their eagerness to lay into the BBC: “Just a few hours later [i.e. after the speech] hundreds of pro-Trump extremists smashed their way into the Capitol. A police officer was among the five who died.”

In fact, the Capitol Police declared a riot some 35 minutes after Trump said “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. So, let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

And here was Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail on Panorama’s “disgraceful” showing of Trump “telling his supporters that he was going to walk to the Capitol with them to ‘fight like hell’ when in fact what he said was that he would walk with them ‘to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard’….the effect was to make it sound as though he was inciting an insurrection, which he certainly wasn’t…”

How silly.

In fact, Trump’s incitement had begun just before Christmas 2020. As the 845-page final report of the bipartisan congressional Select Committee’s investigation into the January 6 riots states:

“At 1.42 a.m., on December 19th, President Trump tweeted: ‘Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!’”

Prescott, however, avers that the report should be discounted because the committee is “not an objective source of truth.”

As for the fury of Panorama’s critics removing Trump’s reference to a “peaceful and patriotic” protest? Trump made only one reference to that in his entire 70-minute speech — about 20 minutes in.

The congressional report says Trump “spent the next 50 or so minutes amping up his crowd with lies about the election, attacking his own Vice President and Republican Members of Congress, and exhorting the crowd to fight. ‘And we fight. We fight like hell’ the President said to a crowd that had already spent the day chanting, ‘Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!,’ and that would keep up the chorus when storming the Capitol.”

After which Trump repeated his encouragement for his fired-up supporters to march to the Capitol.

Prescott dismisses the conclusions of the congressional committee because he doesn’t like the makeup of the committee, presumably because although bipartisan, it had a majority of Democrats. As a supposed independent editorial advisor, he can’t simply dismiss evidence on that basis.

Then there’s the question of who authorised the leak of his report to the Telegraph, where it could be counted on to have the most impact and — as it turns out – the least amount of dispassionate journalistic analysis.

The bottom line is this: to conclude that Panorama “materially misled viewers” would be to explicitly deny the findings of the congressional Select Committee report and the well documented events of the day.

Instead, Prescott and the Telegraph would have us believe that all Trump ever did was to protest peacefully, an obvious travesty of the truth.

The BBC has had a bad run ever since the Gaza war. There were, of course, many notable exceptions, as there always are at the BBC.

Panorama, by contrast, has had on the whole a pretty good run, most recently with its undercover exposé of appalling conduct by some Met Police officers at Charing Cross station. So far six officers have been sacked for gross misconduct as a direct consequence of that programme.

This is proper public interest journalism.

Whatever else may need to be fixed within the BBC, Panorama needs no lessons in journalism from colleagues at the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, or even Michael Prescott.

PS to the Telegraph, Mail and GB News: A fact checker wouldn’t go amiss on your Ireland coverage either.   On Saturday 1 November, the Telegraph published an article headlined “Veteran Who Shot IRA gunman faces fresh Troubles ‘show trial’”.

The article stated: “A British army veteran is being prosecuted for the attempted murder of an IRA gunman more than 50 years after the terrorist was shot, it can be revealed. Known as Soldier B, he faces trial over the shooting of Eugene Devlin in West Belfast in May 1972.

“Mr Devlin, a father-of-one, was later shot and killed in a separate incident in December that year, during an attempted sniper attack on a British army patrol in Strabane. He was buried in Strabane Cemetery in County Tyrone with a full IRA guard of honour and is listed in the IRA roll of honour.”

On the same day, the GB News online platform published an article, based on the Telegraph story, headlined “Veteran faces fresh ‘show trial’ over shooting of IRA gunman more than five decades ago.”

On Monday 3 November, the Daily Mail online platform published an article headlined: “Now ANOTHER veteran, 78, faces attempted murder trial for IRA terrorist shooting 50 years on.”

The article stated: “Soldier B was patrolling in the Andersonstown area of West Belfast on May 12th 1972, when a gunman was identified. Terrorist Eugene Devlin was shot and injured at the scene.”

They all got it badly wrong.

The Eugene Devlin shot in West Belfast in May 1992 was an ordinary civilian, nothing to do with the IRA, was unarmed and was shot without provocation by a group of undercover soldiers from an experimental army unit called the Military Reaction Force, which was so out of control that it was disbanded six months later.

Devlin is a witness in a forthcoming related trial of former MRF soldiers in relation to their alleged role in his attempted murder.

As exposed by BBC Panorama in November 2013.

John Ware was a reporter for BBC Panorama from 1986 to 2012. He is now a freelance reporter for BBC and ITV.

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