The really shock news that shook the UK yesterday was the news of the enforced resignation of the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davie. The BBC Director General and CEO of News, Deborah Turness, resigned on Sunday night, after criticism that Panorama misled viewers in editing a speech by Donald Trump. The Telegraph published a leaked BBC memo suggesting the programme pushed two parts of Trump’s speech together, so he appeared explicitly to encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021. The two sentences attributed to him were actually spoken by Trump but were an hour apart in time but made to appear as though one sentence immediately followed the other. This made it appear that Trump had specifically endorsed the riotous attack on the White House following Trump’s loss of the election in January 6th, 2021. This was undoubtedly an evident, not to say stupid, edit of Trump’s words although not untrue to fact as Trump has actually uttered the two sentences, albeit about an hour apart. Having been alerted, the White House immediately claimed that the BBC was the purveyor of ‘fake news’ and have then reacted with undisguised glee at the ousting of the BBC Director General. What is so galling abut this whole affair is that the BBC have made one very bad error of editorial judgement but have generally striven very hard to be impartial and to be fair. But the White House has regularly been responsible for a mountain of truths, half truths and exaggerations over the Trump years within being subject to any real criticism from any of the Main Street Media, including of course, the BBC. To add to this editorial lapse of judgement, there have been other slips of judgement over, for example, the reporting of the war in Gaza where the BBC has been accused of bias. One of the accusations is that the BBC’s Arabic service was guilty of bias in its reporting of the war in Gaza but even if this was partly true, it is hardly surprising given the listenership to the BBC’s Arabic service which must exclude 99.9% of the UK population. Although the right wing press in the UK had not been restrained in following Donald Trump in criticising the BBC, the counter reaction has been led by the Liberal Democrats. Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, who has said we must stand up for a free press and free speech, responding to news that the BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness have resigned. ‘The BBC is not perfect, but it remains one of the few institutions standing between our British values and a populist, Trump-style takeover of our politics. The resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness must be an opportunity for the BBC to turn a new leaf, rebuild trust and not give in to the likes of Nigel Farage who want to destroy it. As a public service broadcaster, the BBC\u2019s role is vital in ensuring our democracy is based on facts, scrutiny, and accountability. We must stand up for a free press, free speech, and a strong, independent BBC, to stop Trump\u2019s America becoming Farage\u2019s Britain.’ So this row will rumble on for days and, in the meantime, Donald Trump and the White House have become even more emboldened as they gleefully disseminate the fact that the BBBC as well as much of the remainder of the liberal press in the western world is the purveyor of ‘fake news’ But one has to ask the question that what on earth possess the BBC producers not to recognise that their maladroit editing of Trump’s speeches would be quickly spotted and be subjected to immediate criticism. But at the end of the day, Trump did actually utter the two sentences attributed to him and surely a BBC editor could have inserted a comment to indicate that one sentence was not immediately uttered after the other. An esteemed commentator, Nick Robinson, a presenter of the Today programme and the Political Thinking podcast, shared several posts about the resignations on X. ‘It is clear that there is a genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation\u2026 Both things are happening at the same time.’ Meanwhile, Trump has been busy issuing pardons to anybody concerned with the attack on the Capitol building, thus reinforcing the narrative that he is trying to convey that he was essentially robbed of the Presidential election by massive voter fraud. But no independent analyst has managed to come up with the slightest proof that the presidential 2020 election was won fraudulently and Trump lost the popular vote by 4.5% But we are witnessing here one of the biggest ‘rewriting of history’ episodes to be taking place in modern times and one which the Democrats may well be incapable of overturning in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This morning has been the morning of the last day to complete my friend’s recovery process before she returns to her own home tomorrow. We spent the morning both simultaneously cooking and helping to tidy up and reorganise the contents my kitchen. I have to admit that with looking Meg for so long the kitchen was just a place into which I had to dash and cook a meal in the shortest possible time and it is fair comment that to say that some of the contents of my store cupboards had become a little haphazard over time and some food items, particularly on the spice rack, had become out of date and needed some pruning. So, my friend was simultaneously cooking me an excellent Asian meal whilst reorganising the kitchen whilst I watched from the sidelines. But I did pop down into town to get some fresh ingredients to enhance our meal and then we had a really satisfying meal together in the middle of the day, followed by the kind of siesta that we would enjoy if we were on a Spanish, rather than an English timetable. Later on in the day no doubt we will watch a little bit of TV together and then my friend will have completed the few days since her operation, recovering pretty well before we both return our more normal existences together tomorrow. Tonight, I am looking forward to having a conversation with a friend with whom I am re-establishing contact after a period of some years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The really shock news that shook the UK yesterday was the news of the enforced resignation of the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davie. The BBC Director General and CEO of News, Deborah Turness, resigned on Sunday night, after criticism that Panorama misled viewers in editing a speech by Donald Trump. The Telegraph published […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7820"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7821,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7820\/revisions\/7821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}