BBC Leaders Resign Over Trump Speech Editing Scandal

The BBC's top leadership faced a major upheaval on Sunday when Director General Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resigned amid a scandal over the editing of a documentary featuring former U.S. President Donald Trump's January 6, 2021, speech. The controversy, which erupted last week, centers on a Panorama program that spliced excerpts from Trump's address to suggest he directly incited the Capitol riot, prompting more than 500 viewer complaints and an impending formal apology from BBC Chair Samir Shah to the U.K. Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

The program, titled "Trump: A Second Chance?" and broadcast in October 2024 ahead of the U.S. presidential election, combined separate parts of Trump's rally speech with a nearly hour-long gap edited out. In the aired version, Trump appeared to say, "We're gonna walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not gonna have a country anymore." In the original remarks, delivered at the "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., Trump urged the crowd to "walk down to the Capitol" to "cheer on our brave senators and congressmen" and...