US President Donald Trump’s press secretary has described the BBC as “100% fake news” and a “propaganda machine” in an outspoken interview that comes after allegations of bias at the broadcaster.
Karoline Leavitt, a senior White House official in the Trump administration, said watching BBC bulletins while on trips to the UK “ruins” her day, saying taxpayers were being “forced to foot the bill for a leftist propaganda machine”.
Leavitt’s comments came after MPs said the corporation had “serious questions to answer” about the way a speech by the US president was edited by a BBC Panorama documentary.
A document leaked to the Telegraph suggested that an episode of the current affairs programme “completely misled” viewers by splicing two parts of the speech together.
The programme showed Trump saying he would walk with his supporters to the Capitol before the riots on 6 January 2021, urging them to “fight like hell”. However, it omitted a section of the speech where Trump urged the crowd “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.
It was reported late on Saturday that the BBC was expected to apologise for the way the speech was edited, with a BBC spokesperson saying the organisation’s chair would provide a “full response to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Monday”.
In an interview with the Telegraph, Leavitt said: “This purposefully dishonest, selectively edited clip by the BBC is further evidence that they are total, 100% fake news that should no longer be worth the time on the television screens of the great people of the United Kingdom.
“Every time I travel to the United Kingdom with President Trump and am forced to watch the BBC in our hotel rooms, it ruins my day listening to their blatant propaganda and lies about the president of the United States and all that he’s doing to make America better and the world a safer place.”
The newspaper said its reporting was based on a memo written by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee. Prescott left his role earlier this year and has not commented on the document, understood to have been leaked by a whistleblower.
It published an extract that read: “It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that he did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.”
The memo reportedly added that Prescott, a communications consultant and former political journalist, had raised concerns about the way BBC Arabic covered the war in Gaza.
FP/MI
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