Inside the BBC: What really went on

0:02Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:05Emily Maitlis:I would like to say it has been the privilege of my career to serve as the CEO of BBC News and to work with our brilliant team of journalists. I stepped down over the weekend because the buck stops with me. But I'd like to make one thing very clear. BBC News is not institutionally biased. that's why it's the world's most trusted news provider. Why did you fail to deal with the mistakes that were made? And see my teams. Thank you so much. Make no mistake, there are shots being fired there by Deborah Tanness, the outgoing head of BBC News. Is she suggesting that forces within the BBC itself were trying to undermine the editorial impartiality of the job she and journalists were trying to do.

0:55Jon Sopel:We've seen the departure of her and the Director-General. The headline is, it was all down to Donald Trump and the editing of a panorama clip. But there is much, much more that is dark and murky about what has gone on. Welcome to The News Agents.

1:17Lewis Goodall:The News Agents.

1:19Emily Maitlis:It's John. It's Emily.

1:20Lewis Goodall:And it's Lewis. Yes. And we are in the extraordinary position this Monday afternoon of a president of the United States claiming credit for the resignation of the boss, the director general of the BBC, and the head of news of the BBC, a foreign power, a foreign head of government, basically saying he got them sacked or forced their resignation. This is what Donald Trump put on Truth Social last night following the resignations of Tim Davey, the Director General of the BBC for some five years, and Deborah Ternes, the Head of News. The top people the President said in the BBC, including Tim Davey, the boss, are all quitting, fired, because they were caught, quote, doctoring my very good, perfect speech of January 6th.

2:08Lewis Goodall:Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these corrupt journalists. These are very dishonest people who try to step on the scales of a presidential election. And indeed, it is not just, of course, Donald Trump, in a sense, claiming credit for this. It is this curious, bizarre, potentially quite sinister alliance between the president, Boris Johnson, the former prime minister who called for Tim Davy to go, and the Daily Telegraph itself. It is a head spinning set of developments.

2:36Jon Sopel:Why don't we just listen to what it was that Donald Trump said on January the 6th? This is unedited. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and men and women. And this is how Panorama presented it. We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell. The Telegraph story broke a week ago and it has taken literally until now, this moment, for the BBC to respond. And finally, Samir Shah, the chairman of the BBC, his letter has been published to the Media Select Committee, which said the conclusion of our deliberation is that we accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action.

3:33Jon Sopel:the BBC would like to apologise for that error of judgement. And that's been sent to the Select Committee Chair Caroline Dynage. And you wonder, given that two bits of Trump speech from January the 6th weren't contiguous but were nearly an hour apart, were put together and this was exposed on Monday night, why has it taken the BBC a week to say, oops, we got that wrong? And bizarrely, the impression, as you say, Lewis, created that Donald Trump is responsible for the downfall of the director general of the BBC. actually as i think we'll unpack in this episode it's more complicated than that and speaks to dysfunction at the heart of the bbc between two different sections who were at war with each other with news not wanting to give ground and the board of the bbc saying there is something systematically wrong with impartiality at the bbc and those two butted heads and it's resulted in this explosion which has left the BBC leaderless and arguably rudderless right now.

4:51Emily Maitlis:Yeah, this story broke in The Telegraph on Monday night last week. We were together and we understand now that the following morning, Deborah Turness, who was the head of news at the BBC, was very keen to address this head on. She attended a board meeting. She wanted to go ahead with an apology to explain the edit in the panorama. And I was told that she was prevented from doing that. She was blocked by parts of the board, including, I understand, the chair. And he had made clear when I said, what reason, I don't understand what reason she was given. He made clear there was a letter going to the DCMS.

5:38Emily Maitlis:And the point I was told was that she had been very keen on transparency. She has championed that and it didn't happen. She wanted to address this back on Tuesday and that didn't happen. What I would do is try and put this particular error, mistake, whatever you want to call it, in a bit of perspective, because the panorama went out last on November the 2nd of 2024. In other words, three days before the US presidential election. It had been played three times, I think. The press office at the time had a handful of complaints, none of them about the edit. And if you ask the BBC, they'll say, look, you know, we put our hands up.

6:15Emily Maitlis:It was a mistake. It's very, very easy just to put in something that shows one part of the speech comes early and the next part of the speech comes later by putting a wipe or a flash or a time code. It is a mistake. But I think to then come back and say this materially misled viewers is a massive overstatement because by the time that clip was played, set to music as part of a montage, the speech was nearly four years old. Trump made that speech on January the 6th of 2021. Most people would have heard it. Most people would have made their minds up about it by November of 2024. And indeed, Trump's own election denialism had already been a major part of the impeachment process against him, backed by seven Republicans of his own party.

7:02Emily Maitlis:And there was testimony from many people at the time who said it was his words that encouraged us to go down. So I am not saying... But that's why it's so stupid. It was not necessary to conflate those two clips together. OK, my point is that when Michael Prescott, who is the external advisor who had been advising the BBC on impartiality, wrote his dossier, which we now know was leaked to the Daily Telegraph, and in it he said, the programme materially misled viewers, I think you have to step back. I think you have to really step back. And actually, I've read that dossier in full now, and it is not very obvious that he is an independent, impartial advisor.

7:44Jon Sopel:OK, let me just push back slightly on one or two of those things because, you know, for four years I covered Trump's first term as the BBC's North America editor and we had an absolute motto. Our guiding light was be very careful and then be very bold. So when you've got firm judgments to make, make them, but do them on the most solid of foundations. You do not edit two different clips together. that now why didn't the bbc apologize last week for it and that's the fascinating bit of politics that's gone on here i also i mean it's amazing how many people are in the bbc want to get their version of events across and you and i have both had numerous conversations there is a benign explanation that samir shah the chairman felt his first duty was to write to the dcms chair if that's true what a miscalculation it was obvious that trump was going to seize on it and caroline levitt the white house spokesperson would leap on it and sure enough they have the more sinister explanation and this is i think gets to the heart of where the bbc is now is that this was a battle between those on the board and we can start talking about who those people are who wanted more than just an apology a whoopsie daisy that was a bad edit but who wanted a sort of surrender document they wanted to say we've made a mistake here and we do have a problem with impartiality in the BBC structurally and that is something that BBC news bosses absolutely flatly reject including Deborah Tanness this morning when she was walking into the building for perhaps her last time.

9:21Jon Sopel:Yeah and we

9:21Lewis Goodall:should talk about some of the sort of internal criminology of what's been going on on the board because it is relevant but just on that right because this does go to the heart of it this idea of sort of institutional bias against Trump in this case. Although, as Emily says, that memo is actually far more, that dossier is actually sort of far more wide ranging. I feel like I've been living in a parallel universe for the last 24 hours. The hysteria over this story, whipped up by commercial organisations, newspapers, MAGA, the rest of it, the sort of hard right online ecosystem that we talk about all the time.

9:58Lewis Goodall:All that have an agenda is something to behold. That edit in question, John, you're right. It was a mistake. It was clearly misjudged. But the idea that it is somehow a symbol of an institutional bias against Trump or unfair to Trump is an example of institutional bias against Trump is absurd. Yes, it was unfair to Trump because it suggests that in that moment he said something he did not. But how much does that matter? You know, can anyone credibly claim, right, that the overall subject of that documentary was not based in truth and facts? One, Trump lied about the outcome of the 2020 election.

10:37Lewis Goodall:He continues to lie about it to this day. And Trump did incite the mob on January the 6th. In the testimony of all of the people who were arrested and sent to prison because of that, many of them said the only reason they did, what they did was because of what Trump said, right? Yet if you listen to all of this, the conclusion that you would come to is that the sin of that day is a 10 second bloody edit on a BBC programme. We have the tragicomic absurdity of a former British Prime Minister willing to admonish his national broadcaster and demand the resignation of the Director General in the name of Donald Trump's reputation for truth-telling.

11:22Lewis Goodall:And you know what? It goes beyond that because to me, this is a parable of why populists win. Because basically, they get away with it because no one expects anything from them. No one expects them to be truthful. Everyone expects them to lie. And yet we expect everything. And we expect almost no mistakes or problems from the people and places and institutions who actually give a damn. And that is why we're in this problem.

11:49Jon Sopel:But then you get to what's going on within the BBC itself. And bear with us if we just try and explain a bit of the cast of characters that were involved. I've talked about how there was a battle between the news executives and the non-execs who sit on the board. And there's this committee, a subcommittee, on which is a guy called Robbie Gibb. Sir Robbie Gibb, actually. Robbie Gibb at various times has been my boss, has worked, Emily's worked with, Lewis has worked with. He was a news person. He was head of political programmes at Westminster. He then goes across to be Theresa May's spin doctor.

12:30Jon Sopel:And so he's working for the Conservative Party. and he is knighted for his services, political services, and Boris Johnson appoints him to the board of the BBC. So you have a poacher turned gamekeeper turned poacher. And Robbie has an agenda. He's very effective. He's very organised. He is meticulous. And on this committee, he argues that what we need is a researcher for the committee. And he appoints this guy from Newsnight called David Grossman. and David as far as I know and anyone else knows there was no board there was no interview process he was appointed directly he was a mate of Robbie's and he did a lot of the research work where he would be asked to investigate complaints about BBC coverage but the complaints he was always asked to investigate were of left-wing bias never right-wing bias of being anti-Israel but never anti-Palestinian cause, of being anti-Trump but never of being pro-Trump.

13:40Jon Sopel:And so the senior executives in news would go to these meetings and would feel that the board itself had become so politicised by Robbie Gibb that they had nowhere to go but to defend themselves. And ultimately, I think Deborah Tanness's resignation is not about the failure of that edit. is because she would not accept their edict, their viewpoint, that the BBC board had become politicised and she wanted nothing to do with the politicisation of BBC News.

14:14Emily Maitlis:Yeah, I mean, the oldest journalistic question in the world is, who profits, which is not a bad place, I think, to start trying to analyse what is going on here. there has definitely been pressure felt in the BBC newsrooms by the presence of Robbie Gibb on the board in terms of the kind of news that they were able to tell, the kind of stories they were able to prioritise. And when Michael Prescott was pulled in as this external editor, it just so happened that he shared many of the world viewpoints of both Robbie Gibb and, we now understand, David Grossman. Now, maybe that was a coincidence. Robbie Gibb was on the panel that elected him, that brought him in to do his job as the independent advisor.

14:59Emily Maitlis:But if you go through this dossier that he has written, it is really quite extraordinary the stuff that he has singled out. He has a problem with the BBC using the phrase reproductive rights to talk about abortion in the US. He goes to the group History Reclaimed for his history, an independent group of scholars. Those are historians who push back on the research into British imperialism and slavery. He talks about an overemphasis on Trump's eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio. Why was the BBC getting itself tangled up about this? And he picks up a couple. I'm just going to read you a couple of things which are really quite extraordinary.

15:43Emily Maitlis:He says there was an overall tendency back to the panorama to frame issues in a way that was similar to the Harris campaign. less fact-checking of questionable statements. Words used by the Harris campaign were also echoed in some BBC coverage, such as referring to Trump supporters as election deniers. The phrase baseless was also used to describe some of Trump's contested claims, but never in association with questionable claims made by his opponents. In other words, he doesn't even like the use of describing Trump as an election denier or those who supported him as election deniers. So where is he coming from?

16:20Emily Maitlis:We are treating this man like he's an arbiter of neutral reporting. He isn't. It is completely fine to have that viewpoint. It is completely fine to put that viewpoint into the mix and say, oh, should we be looking at that? Should we be pulling in that direction? Should we be looking over here? But actually, the fact that he's written a dossier from his own perspective, from his own very singular perspective of what is right and what is wrong, Taking it to the BBC board, the BBC head of news, the BBC management, who've gone, yeah, some of that we're already doing, actually. We've already addressed the problems you talk about in BBC Arabic.

16:57Emily Maitlis:Some of the stuff we've already put into...

16:59Jon Sopel:A BBC boss has told me that 95 % of the complaints that Prescott raises have been dealt with publicly. So the BBC...

17:06Emily Maitlis:Well, some of it was already in the annual report. Yeah. So this idea that you have somebody who comes in as an arbiter of neutral reporting with his own worldview, which just happens to represent the worldview of very powerful figures on that board, like Robbie Gibb, who don't forget, used to work for Theresa May. He was a spin doctor in Downing Street. He was part of a consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle. We still don't know who the owners of the Jewish Chronicle are, but it is reported that Robbie Gibb was behind the consortium that bought it. And yet Robbie Gibb is called the impartiality czar of the BBC.

17:40Emily Maitlis:He's meant to be a sort of ballast to whatever is the left wing pull. Now, that doesn't make sense. How can somebody with so much political baggage, with so much commercial and political baggage, he also was one of the original founders of GB News, call themselves an impartiality czar? It absolutely makes a mockery of the whole idea.

18:01Lewis Goodall:The thing about this is that I heard Charles Moore, the former editor of The Telegraph, on the Today program this morning, and he made a comment which I think only somebody who had never worked at the BBC in recent years could make, which was that all the BBC's bias, all of the pressure internally, only comes from one direction. It only comes from the kind of liberal left. I think we all know, having worked there, that that is not the case. When I worked there, I felt completely the opposite, in the sense that partly because Robbie Gibb was there and because I had been told that he was sort of observing what I was doing and so on, I felt that there was a very, very strong awareness, a constant pressure to be checking potential liberal left biases, and very, very few coming from the other direction.

18:48Lewis Goodall:And let's be frank, let's be honest. Is anyone at New Broadcasting House sat there thinking, oh, I really worry what Zach Polanski is going to say about this. I'm really worried what the Green Party is going to say about this. I'm really worried even about what the Labour Party is going to say about this. No, because all of the political pressure comes from one direction. And in fairness, that is kind of, you know, that is up to them. Those political forces have the right to do that. What they do not have the right to do, or what some people do not have the right to do, is express that pressure from within in an improper way.

19:20Lewis Goodall:It is all very well having pressure from the outside, but having people from within like Robbie Gibb or like David Grossman doing what they do in the name, as you say, Emily, of impartiality is Kafkaesque. And just in terms of kind of this idea of kind of all complaints coming from one direction, from Gibb and Grossman, that completely accords, I have to say, with my own experience. I've talked on the show before about the problems I had with Robbie Gibb. I mean, I've never really said before, but it is true that I had problems which were truly bizarre with David Grossman. At one point when I was at Newsnight, never spoke to me about it, but decided to go to BBC bosses and had basically drawn up a dossier of things going through my back catalogue, going through the archives, trying to find anything, everything that he could critique me with, attack me with, and so on.

20:09Lewis Goodall:this was a very very unpleasant process it ended up basically being referred up to something called the editorial complaints unit they said this was highly highly unusual that you normally arbitrate

20:19Jon Sopel:with complaints from the outside not from within look i at the weekend on saturday i was with this guy senior in the bbc very calm who says to me you've got to understand there is a coup taking place right now in the bbc an attempted coup and i put it on our group chat saying i've just been I've been with this guy who said there's an attempted coup, which I thought was, you know, completely over the top. And last night we saw the resignation of the director general and the head of BBC News. There was a coup going on. And what you've just described about David Grossman is shocking and not shocking simultaneously.

20:54Jon Sopel:Frankly, if I was going to be appointed a new director general or the new head of news, I would say, OK, if there is going to be a reset, it has to happen without Robbie Gibb in position, where a board has become politicised and it has to happen without these forces that have led the BBC to tearing itself to shreds over the past week.

21:16Emily Maitlis:And why are we talking about it being a coup? Is that completely overblown? We're going to analyse what we've been told after the break.

21:27Jon Sopel:News you can trust and the conversations that matter.

21:31Emily Maitlis:With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks.

21:38Jon Sopel:My American Week is next.