Newsnight accused of selectively editing same Trump Capitol riots speech as Panorama | Newsnight
The BBC’s Newsnight has been accused of editing Donald Trump’s speech to make it appear he had made a more explicit call for violent protests ahead of the Capitol riots.
The company was already reeling after the resignation of chief executive Tim Davie and BBC News head Deborah Turness after the same Trump speech was put together in an edition of Panorama last year.
Trump has since filed a billion-dollar lawsuit in Florida court, according to the White House. The BBC is currently considering how to respond to Trump’s legal claim.
The Telegraph said it had found a 2022 edition of Newsnight which contained a similar splicing of the speech. The edit did not appear to alert viewers to the outage.
The Newsnight edit spliced together a portion of a speech Trump gave on the day of the riots in January 2021, in which he urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, with a later portion of a speech in which he urged them to “fight like hell.”
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney criticized the BBC, which was on air at the time, for splicing together the footage.
“Your video actually tied the presentation together,” he said. “The sentence ‘And we fight and fight like hell’ actually comes later in the speech.”
A BBC spokesman said: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter was brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”
This follows the massive impact of a similar edit in an issue of Panorama published a week before the US election. The attached clip shows Trump telling the crowd: “We’re going to march to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we’re going to fight. We’re going to fight like hell.”
The quotes were taken from parts of his speech almost an hour apart.
Concerns about the panorama cut were raised in a memo by Michael Prescott, the former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee. He left the role in the summer.
The memo was based on examples that Prescott said showed systemic bias at the BBC, which the company rejected.
Some at the BBC argue that the Panorama edit does not significantly alter the meaning of the speech, but others disagree. BBC chief Samir Shah later apologized and said the edit gave the impression of a “direct call for violent action”.
