Articles by Jonathan Holmes

World

A Trump doco has plunged the BBC into crisis. The critics have a good point

But that’s been going on for decades, and neither Britain’s conservative politicians nor its rampant national press have the power that they used to have. For all the meteoric rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the polls, the power in Westminster and Canberra right now is with Labour and Labor. Donald Trump, of course, has demonstrated the most ferocious opposition to critical media outlets, whether they are American or foreign. And it is a documentary about Trump, aired last October in the run-up to the presidential election, that is the primary reason for the resignation of Davie and Turness. Panorama’s editing of Trump’s famous speech on January 6, 2021 was, in my view as in many others’, egregious. Trump is a rambling speaker. It’s normal to edit people down for television. But to take two widely separated fragments of his speech and run them together to suggest that, in a single sentence, he had called on the crowd to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell”, without even a wipe to indicate the edit, is unacceptable. Still, does a single unjustifiable edit in a Panorama program merit the resignation of the boss of the entire BBC? Most people would say, “of course not”.