The BBC doctored a Donald Trump speech by making him appear to encourage the Capitol Hill riot, according to an internal whistleblowing memo seen by The Telegraph.
A Panorama programme, broadcast a week before the US election, “completely misled” viewers by showing the president telling supporters he was going to walk to the Capitol with them to “fight like hell”, when in fact he said he would walk with them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.
The “mangled” footage was highlighted in a 19-page dossier on BBC bias, which was compiled by a recent member of the corporation’s standards committee and is now circulating in government departments.
The dossier said the programme made the US president “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” by splicing together footage from the start of his speech with something he said nearly an hour later.
It claimed senior executives and the BBC’s chairman had ignored and dismissed a string of serious complaints raised by the corporation’s own standards watchdog.
Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son, accused the BBC of dishonesty and “fake news”.
He reposted The Telegraph’s story on X, writing: “The FAKE NEWS ‘reporters’ in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s--- as the ones here in America!!!!”
The Telegraph will soon publish other excerpts of the memo, which accuse the BBC’s Arabic service of bias over its coverage of the war in Gaza, and accuse the corporation of “effective censorship” of its coverage of the transgender debate.
The document raises serious questions about the culture at the BBC, how it affects impartiality and how managers including Tim Davie, the director-general, are accused of turning a blind eye to evidence of bias.
Internal memo sent to BBC managers said:The spliced together version of Trump's comments aired by Panorama made it seem that he 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, the first part of Trump’s speech: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you,” came 15 minutes into the speech. The second half of the sentence that was aired by Panorama, “and we fight. We fight like hell…” came 54 minutes later.
Fifteen minutes into the speech, Trump actually said: “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that he 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.
That was not the end of Panorama’s distortion of the day’s events.
On Jan 6, 2021, the so-called Proud Boys, Trump’s supporters, marched to Capitol Hill before Trump started speaking.
The Conservatives have demanded an immediate investigation into how the Panorama documentary was allowed to be broadcast.
Nigel Huddleston, the shadow culture secretary, said: “These are extremely concerning revelations that could seriously undermine the brand and reputation of the BBC.
“The BBC licence fee is justified on the basis of impartiality and trust.
“There can be no justification for this kind of deliberate manipulation and the spreading of misinformation. “This is not the first time that evidence of bias at the BBC has emerged, but it is one of the most stark and alarming examples to date.
“Licence-fee payers deserve an immediate explanation and apology from the BBC and a thorough investigation into this scandal must take place.”
The most damaging disclosures involve a one-hour Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? that was broadcast in October last year.
As well as altering Mr Trump’s words, the documentary also showed flag-waving men marching on the Capitol in Washington DC on Jan 6 2021 after the president spoke, which “created the impression Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call to arms’”. In fact the footage, was shot before Mr Trump had even started speaking.
The report said Panorama’s “distortion of the day’s events” was so egregious that viewers would ask: “Why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?”
When the issue was raised with managers, they “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards”. The report’s author then warned Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, of the “very, very dangerous precedent” set by Panorama but received no reply.
The internal whistleblower sent a copy of the 19-page letter to every member of the BBC Board last month.
Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, called the revelation a “total disgrace”.
He posted on X:
This is a total disgrace. The BBC has doctored footage of Trump to make it look as though he incited a riot - when he in fact said no such thing. We have Britain’s national broadcaster using a flagship programme to tell palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally. Is anyone at the BBC going to take responsibility - and resign?
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) November 3, 2025
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said: “It’s no wonder that fewer people are paying the BBC licence fee every single year.”
Former BBC radio presenter Liz Kershaw said on X: “This is no surprise to me. I presented news and current affairs programmes on the BBC on four stations from 1993 to 2011. The biased groupthink among its journalists was outrageous and had to be fought and rebalanced every day.”
Caroline Dinenage, the chairman of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee (DCMS) said: “At a time when trust in both politics and mainstream media is so low, our state broadcaster has an additional responsibility to ensure that it reports contentious and potentially inflammatory issues with a straight bat.
What is the EGSC?
The BBC's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) is responsible for ensuring that the broadcaster complies with its own editorial guidelines.
The committee, which is composed of five of the broadcaster's most senior figures, also ensures that the BBC complies with its complaints framework and takes on board findings and directions from Ofcom, the communications watchdog.
It meets every other month although sometimes more regularly. Other BBC board members and senior figures will often attend these meetings.
The committee's members include:
Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, who is responsible for upholding and protecting the independence of the corporation. Since taking over from Richard Sharp in 2024, he has been outspoken in calling for more diversity at the BBC and said he wanted more staff who are “northern working class”. Mr Shah, 73, has also been accused of dismissing staff complaints about anti-Semitism - a claim which the BBC denies.
Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, who is the editorial, operational and creative leader of the broadcaster. His job is under scrutiny following recent scandals including a botched documentary on Gaza and “death to the IDF” rapper Bob Vylan's Glastonbury performance. Mr Davie, 58, has been director-general since 2020 after taking over from Tony Hall and commands an annual salary of more than £540,000.
Deborah Turness, BBC News chief executive, who oversees all news and current affairs programming. Since her appointment in 2022, she has faced particular scrutiny over the BBC's reporting on the Israel-Gaza conflict. She launched BBC Verify, which has become one of the corporation’s most contentious brands. The 58-year-old has responsibility for a team of around 6,000 people and earns a salary of more than £430,000.
Sir Robbie Gibb, a non-executive director on the BBC board. He had a 25-year career at the corporation before leaving in 2017 to become the No 10 communications director under former Prime Minister Theresa May. He was appointed to the board in 2021. Sir Robbie, 61, has previously been a vocal critic of BBC bias and penned an article for The Telegraph in 2020 accusing the broadcaster of being too Left-wing.
Caroline Thomson, senior independent director on the BBC Board, was previously the broadcaster's chief operating officer but quit in 2012 after she was overlooked as the new director-general. She was given a £680,000 pay-off and made headlines after warning the broadcaster could become “arrogant” and “above itself” if it was not careful. Ms Thomson, 71, was appointed to the board in April 2025.
“These allegations are extremely worrying and come at a critical time for the BBC. The DCMS committee will meet tomorrow and will no doubt discuss the implications of this.”
The revelation that the BBC effectively faked a Trump speech is likely to have serious repercussions for the corporation’s already strained relationship with the White House.
It also comes ahead of negotiations with Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, over BBC funding as its royal charter comes up for renewal in 2027. Ms Nandy has previously said “no options are off the table”.
Internal memo sent to BBC managers said:At the EGSC meeting on May 12, 2025, Jonathan Munro asserted: “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.”
In the Panorama programme, Mr Trump appears to say: “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.”
It was accompanied by foreboding music in the background and followed immediately by footage of people marching on the Capitol, with nothing to explain or signal to viewers that the footage had been edited or was out of sequence.
The BBC had spliced together three separate parts of Mr Trump’s speech into what appeared to be one fluent sentence.
In fact, what Mr Trump said was: “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… I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Some 54 minutes later, when Mr Trump was talking about elections being “corrupt”, he said of voters on election day: “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.”
The BBC adviser who wrote the report compared the “shocking” breaches of impartiality to the “Crowngate” scandal in 2007 – when footage of the late Queen Elizabeth II was edited to make it look as though she was storming off a photoshoot – which led to the resignation of the controller of BBC One.
The report on BBC bias was written by Michael Prescott, who spent three years as an independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) before leaving the role in June.
Mr Prescott, a former journalist who has worked in a series of corporate advisory roles, said in a covering letter sent with his dossier, which is now circulating in Whitehall and has been seen by The Telegraph, that he had been moved to act because of his “despair at inaction by the BBC Executive when issues come to light”.
He sent the dossier to the BBC Board because repeated warnings to the EGSC were “dismissed or ignored”.
Mr Prescott wrote in the letter: “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.”
He levelled particular criticism at Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s senior controller of news content, and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News.
He said: “I have been surprised at just how defensive Deborah and Jonathan in particular have been whenever issues are raised. 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.”
The hour-long Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? was aired on Oct 28 last year.
Mr Prescott, one of two independent editorial advisers sitting on the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee at the time, watched the programme and was struck by its “distinctly anti-Trump stance”, with 10 Trump critics featured against just one supporter.
He said he was “shocked” to discover there was no similar programme examining the record of Kamala Harris, Mr Trump’s presidential rival.
Mr Prescott raised concerns with the EGSC and David Grossman, the senior editorial adviser to the committee, was asked to review the programme.
Mr Grossman “highlighted alarming concerns about how Panorama had edited Trump’s speech to his supporters” on Jan 6 2021.
Mr Prescott wrote: “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. This created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers.”
There was no screen wipe or caption over the footage to signal to viewers that it had been edited or was out of sequence.
Mr Prescott said in his report: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. 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.”
The footage also included an audio recording of a police despatcher warning of “three hundred Proud Boys” heading towards the seat of US government.
This was despite the fact that a BBC Newsnight examination of the behaviour of the Trump-supporting Proud Boys, which came out in February 2021 and is still available on the BBC website, stated that the men were “marching on the Capitol even before Donald Trump had spoken at a rally”.
Footage taken at the same time as the Panorama footage was timed at 10.58am that day, an hour before Mr Trump’s speech began.
Mr Prescott said in his report: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. 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.”
The documentary was produced and directed in-house by Matthew Hill, a BBC documentary maker, and edited by Karen Wightman, who has been Panorama’s editor since 2002. It remained on iPlayer for a year after being broadcast before being removed in line with BBC policy.
BBC managers were alerted to the problems with the Panorama programme by Mr Prescott, who said in his letter: “If BBC journalists are to be allowed to edit video in order to make people ‘say’ things they never actually said, then what value are the corporation’s guidelines, why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?
“And yet, faced with David [Grossman]’s findings, the Executive refused to accept there had been a breach of standards and doubled down on its defence of Panorama.”
According to Mr Prescott, at a meeting of the EGSC on May 12 this year Mr Munro said: “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.”
Mr Prescott argued in his letter that “this completely goes against my understanding of BBC editorial policy regarding misleading edits”, and cited the example of “Crowngate”. On that occasion a trailer for a royal documentary had been edited to make it appear as though the late Queen had left a photoshoot “in a huff”, as Peter Fincham, the BBC One controller at the time, told the media, when in fact the clips in the trailer were out of sequence.
Asked why there had not been a companion programme to the Trump documentary investigating the track record of Ms Harris, Mr Munro said it was not necessary “for due impartiality to have companion programmes”.
Ms Turness also “tried to justify the doctored video and mangled timeline of the day” by citing a Democrat-packed congressional committee that concluded Mr Trump was involved in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, but Mr Prescott said this was “no justification for editing video clips so that a presidential candidate appears to say something he never did”.
During the EGSC meeting, “neither the Director-General nor the Chairman made any comment about Jonathan’s dismissive attitude to David’s findings or Deborah’s defence of the edited video clips”, said Mr Prescott.
Mr Prescott was so concerned that he emailed the BBC chairman the next day saying: “This is a very, very dangerous precedent. I hope you agree and take some form of action to ensure this potentially huge problem is nipped in the bud.”
He did not receive a reply from Mr Shah.
In September Mr Prescott wrote to each member of the BBC Board to express his dismay at the corporation turning a blind eye to the Panorama issue and other warnings of bias in recent years. Since then, his letter has found its way to government departments.
Notable times the BBC has been caught out misleading viewers
Fake polar bear shots
In 2011, the BBC was accused of "faking" a scene in Frozen Planet in which a polar bear was filmed inside a den with her cubs. It later admitted the scene had been shot in the controlled environment of a zoo, with a spokesman claiming it would be "impossible" to film in the wild without putting animals in danger.
'Crowngate'
The BBC was forced to apologise to Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 after a trailer for its documentary A Year With The Queen wrongly implied that she had stormed out of a sitting with the photographer Annie Leibowitz. Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC One at the time, resigned over the debacle.
Phone-in fiascos
The broadcaster was fined £50,000 in 2007 after admitting that Blue Peter had asked a young studio guest to pose as a caller when the real telephone system failed during a 2006 phone-in. It was later revealed that six other shows, including Children in Need and Sport Relief, had passed off production staff as genuine viewers or listeners, or invented fictitious winners.
Doctored volcano footage
In a 2015 natural history series Patagonia: Earth’s Secret Paradise, footage apparently showing a single volcanic eruption was actually created by splicing together footage from two different eruptions four years apart. The BBC later admitted it should have made it clear to viewers that the scene had been doctored.
Antiques bidding row
In 2005, a woman was shown bidding for a lot on the daytime antiques series, Flog It!, when she had in fact been at an earlier sale and bidding for a different lot. The incident came to light when the woman's husband complained to the BBC.
Opposition MPs could call on Ms Nandy to launch an investigation. Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee has the power to summon Mr Davie, Mr Shah and others to give evidence about the matters raised in the report should it choose to do so.
When the “Crowngate” scandal erupted, the BBC commissioned a report into the affair by Will Wyatt, a former BBC executive, who concluded that the editing of the trailer by an external production company had been done in a “cavalier fashion”, though nobody had deliberately set out to misrepresent the then Queen. Nevertheless, Mr Fincham resigned over the scandal.
Mr Prescott declined to comment.
A BBC spokesman said: “While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully.
“Michael Prescott is a former adviser to a board committee where differing views and opinions of our coverage are routinely discussed and debated.”
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