The BBC’s chairman acknowledged on Monday that it was too slow in responding over a misleading edit of a speech by US President Donald Trump but rejected claims that the broadcaster’s impartiality was being undermined from within its own board.
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Senior BBC leaders were questioned by Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee amid a major crisis at the publicly funded corporation after its director general and head of news both quit earlier this month and Trump threatened to file a billion-dollar lawsuit.
Chairman Samir Shah said the broadcaster should not have waited days before responding to allegations of biased reporting over a documentary on Trump it broadcast days before the 2024 US presidential election.
The third-party production company that made the film Trump: A Second Chance? spliced together three quotes from a speech Trump gave on January 6, 2021, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell”.
The editing made it look as though Trump was directly encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol as Congress was poised to certify president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Shah has acknowledged that the documentary gave “the impression of a direct call for violent action”.
“I think there’s an issue about how quickly we respond. … We should have pursued it to the end and got to the bottom of it, and not wait as we did till it became public discourse,” he told lawmakers on Monday.