In a stunning blow to one of the world's most trusted news organizations, two of the BBC's highest-ranking executives resigned on Sunday amid explosive accusations of editorial bias, sparked by the misleading editing of a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump. The departures of Director General Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness have ignited calls for sweeping reforms, threatening the broadcaster's reputation for impartiality and fueling debates over its future funding and independence.
The crisis erupted last week when The Daily Telegraph published details from a leaked internal memo by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser on editorial standards. Prescott's dossier accused the BBC of "serious and systemic" biases across multiple areas, with the most damning revelation centering on a 2024 episode of the BBC's flagship investigative series, Panorama, titled "Trump: A Second Chance?" Aired just a week before the U.S. presidential election. The documentary spliced together non-consecutive excerpts from Trump's January 6, 2021, speech to supporters in Washington, D.C.—comments made roughly 50 minutes apart—to create a seamless, inflammatory narrative.
🚨 NEW: President Trump’s lawyers have written to the BBC over misleading Trump speech edit, demanding a retraction, an apology, some kind of compensation and threatening a lawsuit of a BILLION dollars pic.twitter.com/GuUQvRzhzd
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) November 10, 2025
Davie announced his resignation in an email to staff, calling it "entirely my decision" and accepting "ultimate responsibility" for the "mistakes made." Turness, who oversaw BBC News and Current Affairs since 2023, echoed this sentiment, stating the uproar had "reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC—an institution that I love."
The fallout was swift and severe. Over 500 viewer complaints flooded the BBC's regulator, Ofcom, prompting an internal review that had flagged the edit as early as January 2025 but failed to prompt corrective action— a lapse BBC Chair Samir Shah publicly apologized for on Monday as an "error of judgment." Shah conceded the edit "gave the impression of a direct call for violent action" and vowed to implement stricter guidelines, though he stopped short of labeling it intentional bias. President Trump amplified the scandal on Truth Social, branding the BBC "corrupt" and "very dishonest," while threatening $1 billion in legal action over what he called an attempt to "step on the scales of a Presidential Election."