The BBC: A Bridge Too Far?

A film edit is sometimes known as a “bridge”, a term usually used for audio rather than visual content, and it may be that the BBC’s recent creative editing of a speech by Donald Trump is a bridge too far. The two versions of Trump’s now-infamous speech on January 6, 2020 —- both the original and the BBC’s re-imagining on the current affairs program Panorama —- are doubtless familiar to the reader, but can be seen here. The splice joins two of Trump’s statements from the same speech which were originally separated by 54 minutes, and turns Trump’s call for peaceful protest at the Capitol into an apparent call to arms. An endearing trait of Trump’s is giving praise to anyone who has done a good job, even if that person has is an obvious enemy of his. Of the doctored audio, he said: “I don’t know how they did that. Somebody did an amazing job”.

Once this sleight-of-hand was discovered by a Daily Telegraph journalist, there was a degree of collision between excrement and air-extractor. Trump threatened to sue the BBC for $1billion failing a full retraction and apology. The Corporation lost its Director, Tim Davie, and its CEO, Debra Turniss, who quit within days. The number of viewers who had cancelled their TV licenses over the last decade was 2.4 million, but suddenly started to climb exponentially. Inside 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister slowly began to realize that, if the scandal couldn’t bring him down personally, then in media terms (the only ones that matter to the political class), it could harm or even remove his main propaganda megaphone. Predictably, he threw the “state broadcaster” under the bus in public, and was reportedly “very angry”, but that’s all political theatrics. Saving the BBC will now be a political priority, although whether it will be possible is another matter. All in all, a bad day at the office for Auntie, as the BBC used to be affectionately known.

In the world of the British media, this is a big scandal. It’s bigger than the photographic hoax that led to Piers Morgan getting fired from The Daily Mirror for publishing fake pictures of British troops abusing Iraqi civilians. It’s bigger than the previous BBC scandal concerning pedophilia among its celebrities, with Huw Edwards, one of its star presenters, found guilty of possessing indecent images. It’s bigger than Bashir and Diana. But the affair someone will inevitably dub “Editgate” or “Splicegate” is a complex web woven from politics, media (old and new), and the nature of truth.

What of the political aspect? In the normal run of things, it is politicians who make diplomatic blunders, such as that of Anthony Eden invading Suez in 1957 when Eisenhower had effectively told him to do no such thing. It isn’t usually public corporations that imperil the entente cordiale. Also, what one would have assumed is taught in Diplomacy 101 is: If you have made one diplomatic howler, don’t make another. But Starmer likes to think outside the box.

A few hours after the BBC story broke, MI6 suspended intelligence-sharing between Britain and America concerning drug-running in the Caribbean, where the USS Ford has just dropped anchor (or whatever it is aircraft-carriers do). Trump has already video-gamed a few alleged Venezuelan narcos out of the water, and is looking to do the same thing in and around the Islands should anyone step out of line. The President seems to have this odd objection to tens of thousands of Americans being killed by smuggled Fentanyl. Starmer is a lawyer, and the very worst kind of a bad breed, a human-rights lawyer. He believes that blowing criminals out of the water is legally problematic, to use a favorite leftist term. One of Starmer’s aides notes that the PM “doesn’t understand politics”. He certainly doesn’t understand Realpolitik.

Starmer isn’t even a freshman when it comes to flouting diplomatic protocols. During the US Election, Labour sent a gaggle of 100 staffers to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris. If that doesn’t count as election interference, then that term has elastic boundaries. Most of Starmer’s cabinet openly insulted Trump in 2016, as have most of the British left since, and a PM in political trouble anyway will not be looking forward to choosing sides, which is what he’s going to have to do. If Starmer backs the BBC, he puts even more strain on a creaking “special relationship”. Side with Trump, and he enrages the liberal left, which is not difficult. Even New Statesman magazine, about as left-wing as it gets without changing its name to Pravda, has turned against Starmer, and that could be his et tu, Brute? moment. But how did the rest of the British deep state respond to this Transatlantic tussle?

A perfect example is Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrat Party and a man for whom there is absolutely no excuse. His ideological wagon-circling in defense of the BBC, both in the House of Commons and on the intellectual bouncy-castle of social media, was shot through with amateur dramatics. Davey stood up in the House as though he were a Dickensian Whig trying to save a young girl from the gallows. He talked about Trump “coming for” the BBC, which is “our light on the hill”. “We are a nation under attack”, he wailed. Davey wrote to Prime Minister Starmer (at least, Prime Minister at the time of writing) complaining about Trump’s “attack” and “assault” on our beloved BBC. Of course Davey loves the BBC. His progressive worldview is echoed by them. They are on his side.

Other apparatchiks are clucking that Trump’s lawsuit is one more case of his aggressive, imperialistic authoritarianism. This is exemplified by a cartoon in Britain’s left-wing Guardian newspaper in which the BBC is portrayed as some poor creature in the desert being remorselessly hunted down by voracious predators. Another female Labour politician said Trump was only suing because he was interested in making a buck. I think that line of argument may fold under questioning.

Speaking of folding under questioning, what of the BBC’s defense against an accusation of defamation? Here are the three pre-legal defenses the BBC offered up in its watery “apology” after its admission that it doctored the recording:

1. It would not air the program “in that format” again.
2. This did not harm Trump, as he went on to win the election.
3. The whole incident is not worth compensation.

Basically, they are saying the following to Donald Trump: We won’t make the same mistake twice (at least, we won’t get caught doing it next time), it wasn’t election interference since you won, and we’re not paying, so get over it. Trump did not get over it. The apology was about as convincing as those synthesized voices you hear at railway stations apologizing for a cancelled train. You don’t exactly feel a moral urgency there in the shape of remorse. Trump wanted an apology and he got an internal memo.

So, Trump set a deadline, like the bad guys in the movies. It wasn’t high noon though, but the following Friday. Friday came and went, the deadline passed, and from the BBC no further answer was forthcoming. So Trump said, okay, I’m suing. Not for $1billion, though, he said, to the relief of BBC chiefs. No, for up to $5billion. It’s tempting to wonder if this upper figure was arrived at deliberately, as the BBC’s annual revenue is the equivalent to $5.5billion. While the BBC got their trembling accountants working round the clock to see what this meant — can Trump bankrupt us? Can he buy us? — the other main priority must surely have been to steady the ship. Again, the BBC don’t play by the rules.

One would imagine the “Beeb” would be eagle-eyed for any potential repeats of their misbehavior. You can be sure they won’t make the same mistake a second time, and they haven’t. They’ve made it a second and a third time. To be accurate, they had already made the same mistake that has hauled them up in court over Panorama with regard to another program. A few days after the 2024 Panorama story broke, a second program was unearthed from 2022, Newsnight, which used the same doctored soundtrack as Panorama. But here’s the twist: it wasn’t spliced in the same place. The overall false impression that Trump was calling for insurrection was still there, but the recording had been tweaked. It was like two mixes of the same single; the BBC edited their edit. This speaks of a project, something ongoing, of meetings and collusions between producers to try and refine the deception, to improve the product between Newsnight and Panorama. There really is a lot of smoke coming out of this gun.

And then there is Rupert Lowe, the ex-Reform MP who has formed his own political party. He had just told the House of Commons that he believed there should be a referendum on introducing the death penalty for domestic and foreign criminals who had committed serious enough crimes. (It’s one of the certainties in British politics that if there were a referendum on the restoration of the death penalty, the result would be an overwhelming ‘yes’. It’s been like that since the death penalty for murder was abolished in 1965). Lowe was quoted by the BBC (no tape-doctoring this time) as having called for the death penalty for “asylum seekers”, a wholly untrue accusation. Lying is pathological with the BBC, their mouths are full of truth decay. And what of team Trump?

Trump intends to sue in Florida, where he has residency, so the BBC might get some nice footage. They might also have more chance of a favorable result, as Floridian courts are known for their tendency to favor freedom of speech. Given that the edit occurred and has been admitted to, however, the BBC’s motives will be center-stage. I’m no lawyer, but I heard a Fox news contributor who was a lawyer talking about “actual malice” and “reckless disregard”. At least one of those legal definitions seems to me as though it has to do with motive and intention. One of Trump’s legal team, Alejandro Brito, told GB News that “the BBC tried to bring down the President, and accused them of ‘institutional bias’”. The court already knows what the BBC did; they will be judging why they did it.

The BBC have said that they “didn’t intend to mislead people”. Given that they have admitted the deception, this seems absurd. What is the point of a deliberate deception if not to mislead? The BBC is not a self-contained production studio, however, and much of its material is out-sourced, so the onus may be on the prosecution to prove that this was not a procedural error for which the parent company was not culpable. But someone signed off on it, de facto, and I doubt it was some intern who is responsible because they mistakenly pressed the wrong edit button. This didn’t stop Starmer in the House defending the BBC’s actions by saying that “mistakes do get made”. “Mistakes”.

The BBC’s problem is also timing. They released the edited tape not as part of some mid-term appraisal of Trump’s governance, but on the eve of one of the most crucial American elections in history (although it should be noted that the Newsnight precursor to Panorama did come out around the mid-terms during the Biden administration). To play Pollyanna and say, well, Trump won anyway, so we didn’t exactly do much harm, is to misunderstand basic legal principles. It doesn’t matter whether the defendant actually caused any harm, but whether harm was intended. It’s the relationship between between actus reus, the guilty act, and mens rea, the guilty mind. As noted, I am not a lawyer, but I got the A-level and even I can remember the principle of res ipsa loquitur; the facts speak for themselves.

One big winner out of all this is Nigel Farage. Reform’s leader, whose party is currently leading the polls by a country mile, has long advocated for the abolition of the BBC, or at least the removal of its state funding. Addressing a Reform conference, he told of a conversation he had with Trump just after the story broke. The President asked the man widely tipped to be the next Prime Minister: “Is this how you treat your greatest ally?” Trump has already shown the UK that they won’t get a pass on tariffs should they be required, and both the President and his VP have been vocal on the UK’s free speech problem, as well as their ruinous immigration policy, if policy it can be called. In Britain, Big Brother is watching you. But, across the Atlantic, someone is watching Big Brother.

Perhaps the Cold War is not over or, rather, it will resume with new combatants: the US and the UK. “The special relationship is dead”, said former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and she has been prescient in the past. Is the UK about to feel like a little boy, suddenly abandoned when his big brother leaves home to join the army or go to university? How will the relationship that reached peak special when Thatcher danced with Reagan fare? Nigel Farage has been the de facto British Ambassador to the US since before the firing of the last official one, Sir Peter Mandelson. This is the third time Mandelson has been required to leave a Labour party in office. There is a piece on his wretched career here, but a word of warning. It’s a link to a BBC piece, so be advised. This time round, despite Starmer having personally endorsed Mandelson’s role as Foreign Secretary, it turns out his background check had failed to notice ties to Jeffrey Epstein. For readers outside the UK, you may have little idea of just how corrupt the British government is. But the special relationship would be far better off under a Farage premiership — Trump counts him as a personal friend — and Reform would be very happy to operate without the BBC.

The BBC is excellent when it comes to deceiving the public it was set up to “inform, educate, and entertain”, in the words of its founder, Lord Reith, in 1922. But information and education were shown the door some time ago, and the current scandal is the most entertaining BBC output in years. As for the notorious “BBC bias”, I was pleased to see a weblog called Biased BBC still running, as I was reading it a quarter of a century ago and it does exactly what it says on the label; it forensically examines each and every instance of political bias by the “state broadcaster”. And, boy, does it have some archives. One recent instance of deception was actually practiced on the Corporation itself, when it opened its much-trumpeted BBC Verify, an “independent and impartial” fact-checking service to keep the public from the devil of misinformation. They really ought to have verified the CV or resumé of the girl who got the job, Marianna Spring, as she was rather economical with the truth concerning her journalistic career to date. But it is deception of another kind which is of a deeper, more philosophical interest.

The outgoing CEO of the BBC, Debra Turniss, made an extraordinary claim to camera just after she had cleared her desk. “There is no bias”, she said, “at the BBC”. This is more than just a lie, it represents an entire epistemology, a version not of truth but of how truth is constructed.  Surely she must have known she was lying. Mastering cognitive dissonance is an entry-level requirement for the political and media class, so saying one thing and knowing another to be true is schoolgirl stuff. I’m not so sure. People of Ms. Turniss’ ideological stripe at the BBC — and they all are — believe so totally in their moral rectitude that they cannot consider that they might be doing something wrong (and that includes lying) whatever that something is. This meme makes the point effectively.

Their thought process runs something like this; if the object of the edit was to discredit President Trump, which is a priori an outcome to be desired for the betterment of the world in general, then we were right to do it. It doesn’t matter that we tinkered with reality, because if reality is incorrectly ordered then reality must be tinkered with. We are here to fix it. A BBC executive would not understand the difference between David Hume’s “is” and “ought”. This is what happens when you mix morality with epistemology. Their moral code is absolutely clear: they do not believe they are in the right. They know they are. In their own hermetically sealed epistemology, the BBC — and all its minions — know that they are right in the same way we know that the triangle contains the same amount of internal degrees whether it’s in London, Paris, or Rome.

BBC impartiality is like the Loch Ness Monster; everyone has heard about it, a few claim to have seen it, but it does not exist. The BBC are not there to report on world events, they see themselves as existent in order to tell you what those events mean. Journalist Peter Hitchens puts it succinctly; “The BBC operate a slick operation for their own worldview”. Well, the operation may not be so slick if the BBC has to brass up $5 billion.

As a character in an old British sitcom might have said, “who’s going to pay for it all, that’s what I’d like to know?” Any punitive payment made by the BBC to Trump will, of course, come from the weal they hold from the TV license fee — currently £174.50 a year — and predictable voices have already been raised. It is tiresome to read people who should know better describe the license fee as a “tax”. It is not, it is a fee. One is compulsory, the other elective. If you don’t want to pay the “TV tax”, don’t have a television. But the license fee will have to go up to pay for any award to Donald Trump that breaks that bank at the BBC. As soon as the news broke, some little pointy-head at the BBC did his sums and estimated that the $1 billion being talked about as Trump’s (then) reparation would put £30 on every TV license in Britain. You have to applaud the BBC; they will even try to persuade people to blame a rise in the license fee on Trump.nd what of the BBC itself? It won’t last in the shark-infested waters of the free market because it’s never had to try. It’s already had its monopoly on sport taken away by Sky and its grip on drama loosened by Netflix. The BBC’s Royal Charter is under review, and Nigel Farage certainly won’t be recommending it be signed. If Trump does break the BBC, it can’t file for bankruptcy, it’s not that sort of limited company. What will happen is that the government will “step in” and save its main propaganda tool, and it will do it with what it usually terms “government money”, in reality the tax weal. All that means is that if someone cancels their TV license out of disgust with the BBC, they will still help to pay for saving it via income tax.

But, whoever throws them a life-jacket, and whatever the outcome, the BBC will be a tarnished brand in the eyes of the people who pay its wages, the viewing public. Surely this is the hill the license fee dies on. And the man who will have bayoneted it didn’t even choose to fight.

The BBC, along with the British political class as a whole, simply don’t get Trump and they never have: The patriotism, the attacks on big government, the criticism of other countries, the dismissal of climate change, the apparent desire to stop illegal immigration, and the pro-White stance (although that is something whose name Trump doesn’t seem to be able to speak). It’s totally alien to the mindset of the British. But, as far as the BBC are concerned, those baseball caps with MAGA emblazoned on the front may as well read FAFO.

If the BBC does go down, at least there will be something worth watching on television.