Author of leaked BBC memo tells MPs the corporation is “not biased”

The author of the leaked memo that led to the resignation of the BBC’s director general has told MPs that the corporation is “not biased” and that Donald Trump’s reputation was “probably not” harmed by the Panorama edit he highlighted.

The memo, sent to Ofcom and the Department for Culture, Media & Sport and published by The Telegraph this year, revealed that the BBC had spliced together footage of Trump from an hour apart, making it appear he was inciting a riot on 6 January 2021.

Michael Prescott also raised concerns about the BBC’s reporting on Gaza, on the trans debate and on ethnic minorities in the UK, but it was the Trump edit, which has prompted a threatened $1bn legal action, that dominated the headlines.

Before the committee

Appearing before the Culture, Media & Sport Committee, Prescott was pressed on whether the edit had damaged Trump. He said: “I can’t think of anything I agree with Donald Trump on.”

Director general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness both resigned after the memo emerged. Prescott, previously an adviser to the EGSC, the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines & Standards Committee, left the role because he felt his concerns were not being taken seriously.

He told MPs that when he saw the Trump Panorama last year he felt straight away that it lacked balance. He passed this on to former BBC correspondent David Grossman, whose review formed the basis of the memo.

“It felt quite anti-Trump,” Prescott said. “But there was a black and white response [from the BBC]. They did not accept there was a problem with their US presidential coverage or the Panorama program. And they had a different view about the video splice.”

‘Systemic causes’

Asked repeatedly whether BBC news coverage was biased, he said: “I don’t think it’s biased. I didn’t use that phrase anywhere in the memo. Let’s be clear, tonnes of stuff it does is world class. Everything I spotted [in the memo] had systemic causes and the root of my disagreement is the BBC was not treating these as having systemic casues.”

He identified those systemic causes as the BBC’s refusal to listen to criticism of its news output and excessive defensiveness.

“I was frequently seeing the BBC’s idea of dealing with something was to change the editors around and tweak guidelines,” he said. “There was never any willingness to look at what went wrong there and there were deep implications.”

Prescott denied leaking the memo to The Telegraph. He said the paper being seen as right-leaning was a “bit of a barrier to people elsewhere on the [political] spectrum taking this as seriously or thinking it was as straightforward as it seems.”

He said he took no pleasure in Davie’s resignation, calling him a “supreme talent, and it’s a tragedy he’s gone, but he had this blindspot on editorial failings…He seemed to be to be doing a first rate job across 80% to 90% of the portfolio apart from his blindspot on editorial failings.”

He also backed calls for the director general role to be split in future.

Prescott described himself as a strong supporter of public service broadcasting, saying he took the EGSC adviser role because it looked like a “fantastic opportunity.” “I come from a working class background, I’m the son of immigrants and got into Oxford from a local state school partly because of the excellence of public service broadcasting,” he said.