BBC faces leadership crisis after news bosses quit over Trump speech
edit and bias claims
[November 10, 2025]
By JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) — The BBC was facing a leadership crisis and mounting
political pressure on Monday after its top executive and its head of
news both quit over the editing of a speech by U.S. President Donald
Trump.
The resignation of BBC Director-General Tim Davie and news chief Deborah
Turness over accusations of bias was welcomed by Trump, who said the way
his speech had been edited was an attempt to “step on the scales of a
Presidential Election.”
BBC chairman Samir Shah was expected to issue and apology for the
actions of the publicly funded national broadcaster on Monday.
The BBC has faced a storm of criticism for misleading editing of a
speech Trump made on Jan. 6, 2021, before a crowed of his supporters
stormed the Capitol in Washington.
Its “Panorama” documentary program spliced together two sections of the
speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one
quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like
hell." Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted
supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
In a letter to staff, Davie said "there have been some mistakes made and
as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Turness said the controversy about the Trump documentary was “causing
damage to the BBC."
“In public life leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I
am stepping down,” she said in a note to staff. “While mistakes have
been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC
News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
Trump posted a link to a Daily Telegraph story about the speech-editing
on his Truth Social network, thanking the newspaper “for exposing these
Corrupt 'Journalists.' These are very dishonest people who tried to step
on the scales of a Presidential Election.” He called that "a terrible
thing for Democracy!"
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reacted on X, posting a
screen grab of an article headlined “Trump goes to war with ‘fake news’
BBC” beside another about Davie's resignation, with the words “shot” and
“chaser.”
Trump speech edited
Pressure on the broadcaster’s top executives has been growing since the
right-leaning Daily Telegraph published parts of a dossier compiled by
Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and
guidelines.
As well as the Trump edit, it criticized the BBC’s coverage of
transgender issues and raised concerns of anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s
Arabic service.
The “Panorama” episode showed an edited clip from the January 2021
speech in which Trump claimed the 2020 presidential election had been
rigged. Trump is shown saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol
and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
According to video and a transcript from Trump’s comments that day, he
said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer
on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not
going to be cheering so much for some of them.
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BBC Director-General Tim Davie is pictured at BBC World Service
offices in London, Thursday, April 28, 2022. (Hannah McKay/Pool via
AP, File)
“Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have
to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand
that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who
have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol
building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Trump used the “fight like hell” phrase toward the end of his
speech, but without referencing the Capitol.
“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not
going to have a country anymore,” Trump said.
A national institution
The 103-year-old BBC faces greater scrutiny than other broadcasters
— and criticism from its commercial rivals — because of its status
as a national institution funded through an annual license fee of
174.50 pounds ($230) paid by all households with a television.
The broadcaster is bound by the terms of its charter to be
impartial, and critics are quick to point out when they think it has
failed. It's frequently a political football, with conservatives
seeing a leftist slant in its news output and some liberals accusing
it of having a conservative bias.
It has also been criticized from all angles over its coverage of the
Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. In February, the BBC removed a documentary
about Gaza from its streaming service after it emerged that the
child narrator was the son of an official in the Hamas-led
government.
Governments of both left and right have long been accused of
meddling with the broadcaster, which is overseen by a board that
includes both BBC nominees and government appointees.
Craig Oliver, a former BBC news executive who worked as director of
communications for Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, said
those at the top needed to do a better job at defending the
corporation.
“We’re living in a fast-moving digital world where there are a lot
of people who want to attack the BBC," he said.
“It’s been obvious for days now that the BBC needed to step up,
explain, apologize, move on. And what we’ve seen is the governance
of the BBC saying, ‘we’ll get back to you on Monday – we’ll leave
that for days. We’ll allow the president of the United States to be
attacking the institution, and we’re not going to properly defend
it.’”
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