Here’s what happened on BBC’s Newsnight. 54 minutes apart, US President Donald Trump says he’s going to march down peacefully to cheer on Republicans, not so much the others, a perfectly reasonable political thing.
And 54 minutes later, he says he’s going to fight for his country, a perfectly normal form of political expression, which the BBC not just once, but twice, decided to move together, merge together.
To give the impression that Donald Trump was encouraging people to riot, was encouraging civil disorder, was so cross that he’d lost the election that he was going to try and upend the Constitution.
The first time it was on Newsnight. Now, Newsnight is not produced by an independent production company.
Jacob Rees-Mogg says the BBC ‘have been caught out’ on Donald Trump clips
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GB NEWS
It is produced in-house at the BBC. I was there earlier this week on Monday, and they’re charming, delightful people. It’s always a pleasure to go on.
But it is an in-house BBC Broadcasting House production, and this was two years before the Panorama program, an outsourced program, did much the same thing.
The clips are very marginally different. And what does the BBC do? It blames the production company, whereas, in fact Kirsty Wark, who was presenting on the night in question, was told by Mike Mulvaney that your video was actually spiced together the presentation, that line about we fight like hell is later in the speech.
So the BBC knew, and what did they do? Nothing.
And why is this? Do you think it’s because they don’t like Donald Trump? Do you think because the BBC has an institutionalised metropolitan view that Donald Trump is simply not flavour of the month? He’s not one of them. He’s not their type of person.
You might say he’s not the sort of person you would invite to dinner in Islington, and because of that, because they don’t like him, they believed that he might have said it, and that is why they were willing to broadcast it, not just once, but twice.
It is said that a little leaven leavens all the bread. And I think this applies here, because what does that mean? It means that in small things, you see the whole, you see from this relatively minor editing error made twice by the BBC something fundamental about the BBC.
You see what its view is, what its corporate view is, what the culture of the BBC is, and that is a metropolitan, essentially leftist one that finds Trump distasteful, finds Brexit distasteful, finds conservatism, particularly proper capitalist conservatism, too much to deal with, and that comes through in broadcast after broadcast.
They’ve been caught out.
And the question is, with Trump threatening them with a £750million lawsuit, can the BBC survive this discrediting, this crashing of its reputation?
Because a broadcaster depends upon its reputation to have viewers trust it. Why would any Conservative trust the BBC?