Trump Lashes Out at ‘Corrupt,’ ‘Dishonest’ BBC Over Doctored Jan. 6 Footage
President Donald Trump unloaded on the BBC Sunday after top officials resigned over the use of deceptively edited footage of his January 6, 2021 speech — a move he slammed as foreign interference in a U.S. election and a disgrace to democracy.
“These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!”
The scandal erupted after a whistleblower exposed that the BBC’s “Panorama” program had spliced two separate parts of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse to make it appear as if he directly incited the Capitol riot. Director General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness resigned over the revelations, which were first reported by The Telegraph just days before the 2024 election.
In the aired program, Trump was 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.” But the original transcript shows that the “fight like hell” line came over 50 minutes after the call to march, and in a completely different context.
The BBC admitted the misleading edit, with Chairman Samir Shah telling a parliamentary committee on Monday that the edit “did give the impression of a direct call for violent action” and apologized for the “error of judgement.”
Trump, who returned to Washington Sunday from Mar-a-Lago, blasted the resignations as proof of corruption.
“The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught ‘doctoring’ my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th,” he wrote. “Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these Corrupt ‘Journalists.’”
Shah defended the segment as part of a larger effort to help the audience “better understand how it had been received by President Trump’s supporters,” but conceded the matter was poorly handled internally and should’ve been pursued further when it first aired. He claimed the misleading edit wasn’t corrected earlier because it aired before the 2024 election and didn’t spark a flood of viewer complaints.
The incident has triggered renewed scrutiny of the BBC’s journalistic practices — and not for the first time.
“Panorama,” often described as the British equivalent of “60 Minutes,” has faced major ethical controversies in the past. Most infamously, journalist Martin Bashir was found to have used forged bank documents to convince Princess Diana to sit for her 1995 tell-all interview. That scandal, years later, led to a blistering public condemnation from both Prince William and Prince Harry, who blamed the BBC’s misconduct for exacerbating Diana’s paranoia and isolation in the lead-up to her 1997 death.
The Trump campaign and his allies have already begun highlighting the BBC’s January 6 footage as another example of election interference — this time from overseas. In the final days of the 2024 campaign, many in Trump’s orbit cited the doctored edit as a deliberate attempt to shape public opinion against the president at a crucial political moment.
Attorney General Pam Bondi hinted over the weekend that the Department of Justice may investigate foreign media interference, calling the Panorama edit “just the tip of the iceberg.”