British Journalist Breaks Down BBC Controversy Over Trump Speech

And President Trump now awaits a response from the BBC to his 1 billion dollar lawsuit threat amid a controversy that has led to the resignation of two senior executives at the BBC and has led to the public broadcasters chairman apologizing. The controversy is over intentionally edited as well as omitted language from Trump's January 6th, 2021 speech on the day of the capital breach. The omission intentionally removes the key words, quote, to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard, and it splices together two sound bites that appeared almost 1 hour apart as if they were continuous language in Trump's speech. The result, the altered language taken out of context, gives the viewer the impression that Trump intentionally incited violence on that day. Joining us now for analysis from London is Lee Hall. He's the host of Entity's British Thought Leaders. Lee, thank you so much for joining us this morning or your afternoon. What were your initial thoughts to this story? >> Great to be back, Carrie. I wasn't surprised by this. I think something like this had to happen and I think more will happen in Britain's mainstream media, in my humble opinion, has been biased against Donald Trump for over 10 years now. He's the most powerful man in the world and they're in a bit of a pickle. I mean, let me give you a viewers some background. At the time of my parents, even when I was younger, there wasn't this choice of TV and radio, there was BBC. You watched as a child, as a senior, whether you like sports, finance, cooking, whatever your taste, the BBC would cater for you. So, we grew up trusting and and loving the BBC. It's Britain's finest export, respected worldwide for being unbiased and fair. So, I mean, something like this is is just a bombshell really to a to a British person. If you can't trust the BBC, then who can you trust? Yeah, it is quite surprising that the the intentionality in trying to change the meaning of what were direct quotes in a speech. But I the thing that I don't understand is you know why is this surfacing now? >> Okay. So in June uh Michael Prescott who's a former standards advisor to the BBC he sent this 19page memo to the BBC board and and he stepped out. He criticized the BBC's editing President Trump's January the 6th speech said it's completely misleading and he wrote of his despair in action by the BBC executive over widespread evidence of bias. So he talked about transgender issues, he talked about Israel. So Britain's Telegraph newspaper, they got hold of this memo and they've recently broke the story. It's been enormous and we've seen the fallout already. The director general has gone, the news CEO has resigned. So they they've fallen on their swords, but they still deny there's any institutional bias. I think it's also worth reflecting on the financial side of this. In Britain, you have to pay the BBC license fee. If I buy a TV, you just to watch you guys on NTD and don't watch BBC, I still have to pay this $230 a year license fee. People are are a bit fed up. They see it as an unfair tax. And the BBC has uh seen the income from the license fee down 30% over the last 15 years. So they turned to America as a way to solve this cash flow problem. Rolled out a subscription service in June in the US. Now the White House is talking about banning BBC reporters and this is a serious problem for them. >> Yeah, such an interesting turn of events. Yesterday we played a reaction from Nigel Farage. He's the leader of the Reform UK party. He said the timing of this documentary with with the misleading editing uh it amounts to election interference. What was Farage referring to? >> Well, this documentary with the the edited January the 6th clip was released in October 2024. So that's just before the US election. And this was released by Panorama, which is BBC's flagship documentary maker, most trusted program really. And yet it gave the impression that Donald Trump's derelion inciting violence ahead of what happened at the capital on January the 6, but he wasn't. And the BBC is this powerful international organization. Releasing something like this ahead of an election uh could have a serious impact. So as you mentioned that the chair apologized, called it an error of judgment that misled the viewers. I think if if President Trump had lost that election, this would have just got lost in the kind of annals of history. But he didn't. and things went a different way and now the BBC has made it bad and is kind of lying in it. >> Yeah, it's so interesting. We, as you mentioned, um it seems like they're coming to the US not only for offering a subscription service to help with their own cash flows. But we see an unusual courting of President Trump um by the royal family. he's there's been a lot of pomp and circumstance for him to come and visit. Um I presume in an effort to um you know keep relations strong and and Trump has said himself that you know we have no greater partner uh than than Britain for the United States. Um so h how does this then play into that being as you mentioned that you know the BBC is really not separate of the British government. >> Yeah and that's kind of the main issue here. The BBC is not some kind of private organization doing what it wants to do. It's funded by money collected from the taxpayers. Uh and you know it has a constitution that's overseen by the government etc. So it's it's really important what the BBC says and does. If you've got part of Britain such as our prime minister or our royal family trying to improve connections with the the US administration and with President Trump particularly and at the same time you've got the BBC doing things that are seen as a bit kind of unethical uh to say the least. Then that's quite a serious problem to deal with really two kind of opposing factions almost. >> Yeah. And then another incident that came up was when a bombing at a Gaza hospital happened. The BBC was quick to report that Israel carried out the attack, but it turned out it was friendly fire and it was actually Hamas terrorists who blew up their own hospital. Um the the BBC leadership had said that this was a one-off incident with Trump, but here we see another incident. So is there a systemic um problem within the BBC? And if so, how does it get addressed? Yeah, I would completely agree with you. There's a systemic problem and addressing it will be very difficult. In the editing of the president's speech is kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. I mean, it's a big straw. The poor camel. This is a $1 billion lawsuit, but there's loads of other issues before this. You mentioned Israel and Gaza. There's ongoing accusations of biased BBC reporting there. There was a documentary BBC documentary on Gaza breached the offcom broadcasting rules and was removed. It was narrated by the son of a Hamas minister and the BBC didn't disclose that Hamas is banned in the UK by the government's terrorists. BBC refuses to call them terrorists. Dame Pretty Patel who is member of parliament, former government minister, she is demanding the government review funding of BBC's Arabic service. She says it's so biased it risks becoming the Hammers Broadcasting Service instead of the British Broadcasting Service. And then there's all the the gender issue stuff. So we've got gender critical campaigners sending a letter to the BBC board saying the BBC's normalization of transgender ideology has had real harmful consequences. There's lots of positive stories about drag queens. There's very little about what dransitioners have been through. For example, and going back to Mr. the Prescott's memo that started this whole situation. He said that BBC's transgender coverage was subject to censorship by this specialist LGBT reporter team who just refused to cover gender critical stories. So I think as with many parts of our society, the BBC's been subject to this ideological shift in many areas. It's going to be really difficult for them to get out of this. >> Well, these are very much surprising revelations. Appreciate your coverage and following this. Hope to keep up keep up with it with you. Lee Hall, thank you for joining.