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PULSE POINTS
❓WHAT HAPPENED: A whistleblower revealed that the BBC altered footage of a speech by President Donald J. Trump to make it appear he was inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: The BBC, Donald Trump, and Michael Prescott, a former BBC standards committee adviser.
📍WHEN & WHERE: The BBC Panorama programme Trump: A Second Chance? including the doctored speech aired in October 2024, with the report on the scandal emerging in November 2025.
💬KEY QUOTE: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it.” – Michael Prescott
🎯IMPACT: The revelation could affect the BBC’s relationship with the White House.
IN FULL
An internal whistleblowing memo has revealed that the BBC edited footage of a speech by President Donald J. Trump, making it appear as though he was encouraging a riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This information, contained in a 19-page whistleblowing memo, reveals that the BBC Panorama programme Trump: A Second Chance? misled viewers by splicing together different parts of Trump’s speech to create a false narrative.
“The spliced together version of Trump’s comments aired by Panorama made it seem that [President] 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,’” reads the whistleblowing memo on the scandal, which was sent to BBC managers.
“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,” it notes, adding: “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.’”
The memo brands Panorama‘s spliced clip “completely misleading,” stressing that the “fact that [President 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.”
Notably, the Panorama programme also cuts in footage of men marching on the Capitol following Trump’s speech, when in fact they marched on the Capitol before the President began speaking.
Michael Prescott, a former member of the BBC’s standards committee, authored the memo. He criticized the BBC for ignoring serious complaints about the programme’s bias and for failing to address the issue. Notably, Prescott sent his findings to the BBC’s board and chairman, India-born Samir Shah, urging them to address the problem, but he received no response.
Prescott also raised issues about the programme’s clear anti-Trump bias, with ten critics interviewed for it against just one supporter, and no similar programme examining Trump’s rival, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, being produced. As a compulsory television license fee funds it, the BBC is required to be balanced and impartial in its coverage—although there is little enforcement of this requirement, and it is widely regarded as having an institutional left-wing bias.
Image by Matt Cornock.
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