Had it been any other organisation but the BBC, just a smirk and a knowing shrug would have been enough to acknowledge egregious shortcomings in standards. The media, after all, has now garnered a reputation for bias and partisan reportage. But a public funded broadcaster—entities often touted as adhering to higher standards of integrity than so-called private media—being caught blatantly breaking rules of reportage is like a body blow to the whole genre.

It is one thing to deliberately allow the telecast of the anti-Semitic/anti-Israeli diatribe of a musician at Glastonbury Festival, but it is another matter altogether to deliberately cut and paste the rousing speech of a US Presidential candidate to imply that he was advocating armed insurrection. As that allegation was one of the main planks of the opposition’s campaign against him, surely this then counts as a case of British interference in the US elections, not Russian?

In any large organisation, including the media, there are innumerable checks and balances. In fact, the bigger the organisation, the more onerous their failsafe measures. It is inconceivable that the deliberate dicing and splicing of Donald Trump’s speech would not have been run past several higher-ups before being done, given the implications of the US elections. No ginger group could have pulled this off without anyone up and down the line catching on.

It is strange that none of the veteran newsroom bosses who saw BBC’s flagship Panorama programme before it was aired noticed that Trump’s speech sounded uncharacteristically concise or even remembered that particular peroration given how many times it was reiterated since 2020. Had Trump indeed said ‘them fightin’ words’ in exactly that succinct sequence—not 55 minutes apart as was the actual case—legal action in US would have been inevitable.

No one in such a huge and hoary news organisation had a niggle about verifying the statement before letting it become the punchline of a programme that was to go on air just before Americans came out to vote. That sounds highly improbable. So it must be concluded that there was concurrence about what was being done—‘doctoring’ the long speech to put the beginning and the end together, cutting out the........

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