The BBC has gone full Pravda in its war of lies against Trump

The BBC loves to pose as a warrior against ‘fake news’. Yet it now stands accused of pushing an entirely fake account of President Trump’s behaviour on 6 January 2021. That’s the day the Capitol building in Washington, DC was stormed by a rag-tag army of angry right-wingers convinced the election had been stolen from Trump. And last year the BBC showed footage of Trump telling the mob he would march with them to the Capitol and ‘fight like hell’. Only that never happened. The BBC made it up. It doctored the footage. This is beyond serious. These are Pravda levels of manipulation.

The accusation against the BBC comes from an internal document. A 19-page dossier on BBC bias was compiled by a one-time member of the Beeb’s standards committee. The document’s findings are chilling. It singles out an episode of Panorama, the BBC flagship current-affairs show, for special opprobrium. Broadcast just a week before the presidential election in November 2024, it shows Trump in January 2021 saying: ‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell. [If] you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.’

There was only one problem: Trump didn’t say that. The BBC spliced together two entirely different remarks from Trump, made 54 minutes apart, in order to make it look like he was recklessly stirring up the mob and endangering the sanctity of American democracy. What Trump actually said was: ‘We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol… peacefully and patriotically to make your voices heard.’ Then, almost an hour later, once more sharing his view that the election was ‘corrupt’, he thanked the people who voted for him and said: ‘We fight.’ ‘We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.’

It matters not one iota what you think about Trump’s complaining in 2021 that the election was nicked from him – I thought it was a load of post-truth bluster that annoyingly brought to mind the whinging of Hillary Clinton in 2017 when she continually questioned the ‘legitimacy’ of Trump’s win in 2016. The important point is that in cutting together two entirely separate remarks in order to make it appear as if Trump were inciting violence – all of it accompanied by sinister-sounding music – the BBC flat-out hoodwinked its viewers. It lied to them. It ‘completely misled’ them, in the words of the internal dossier.

It’s impossible to overstate the seriousness of this. Think about the sheer deception involved in this Orwellian mashing together of a politician’s comments in order to paint him in the grimmest light possible. The BBC completely erased what Trump actually said to his supporters on 6 January, which is that they should march peacefully. In memory-holing his plea that people make their voices heard ‘peacefully and patriotically’, and adding in something he said 54 minutes later about the need to ‘fight’ against ‘corruption’, the Beeb engaged in open misinformation. It distorted the truth in the service of ideology – in this case, the Trump Derangement Syndrome that’s rife among the media elites.

It is hard to see this as anything other than an intentional twisting of reality to bruise a candidate’s reputation ahead of an election. The BBC showed contempt not only for Donald Trump (he’s big enough to look after himself), but also for its own viewers. It infantilised them by feeding them a dystopic fairytale about Trump that it must have known was weaved from half-truths and conscious distortions. It broke the first rule of journalism, which is to be truthful. And it crapped all over the first rule of public broadcasting, which is to be neutral.

This incident shatters the BBC’s claim to be the implacable moral foe of misinformation. For some time, the Beeb has been positioning itself as an island of reason in what it views as the swirling seas of populism and lies. It has put out adverts bigging itself up as one of the last guardians of truth. ‘The fight for truth is on’, said one, smugly contrasting the Beeb with Alex Jones and other digital hotheads who pump BS all over the digital highways of the internet. But then Panorama blatantly doctors a politician’s comments. That’s as dishonest and sinister, as motored by bitter ideology, as anything you’ll see on the internet.

So far, the BBC has been silent about this scandal. BBC Verify – its ‘anti-misinformation’ wing – has said nothing. I trust the Verify hacks are at this very minute working on an exposé of their own corporation’s dishonesty (sarcasm). It should be clear to everyone now that the BBC has badly lost its way. The internal dossier also raises concerns about BBC Arabic’s staggering bias in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas War and the Beeb’s ‘effective censorship’ on the issue of transgenderism, when it would often sideline the voices of gender-critical women.

Think about this: we have a public broadcaster that made stuff up about Donald Trump, which fully went along with the lie that someone with a cock can be a woman, and whose coverage of Gaza has been obsessive, one-eyed and at times outright Israelophobic. One is forced to ask: who does the BBC serve? It increasingly feels like it doesn’t serve the truth. Or us. Rather, it has made itself into the media wing of that influential section of society that is drunk on Trump hate and mad ideas like trans. An overhaul is needed, and quick.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy