Most people agree that the way the BBC Panorama program “Trump: A Second Chance?” edited excerpts from Donald Trump’s speech to MAGA supporters before the riot on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 was unethical.  Even deceptive.

No one seems to have noticed that the man who exposed the inappropriate edit did something very similar in his leaked memorandum to the BBC Board.

But the usual Australian critics have been happy to jump on the British bandwagon, accusing the ABC of deceptive conduct and calling for inquiries into its impartiality.

Last week Alumni director Jonathan Holmes wrote in the Nine newspapers that the BBC’s critics had a point. But he’s now wondering whether the scandal that led to the resignation of the BBC’s two most senior executives was, after all, a political hatchet job.

Here’s a bit of a scandal that none of the BBC’s numerous critics (or indeed its supporters) seems to have noticed.

The whole saga that resulted in the resignation of Director-General Tim Davie and Head of BBC News Deborah Turness was kicked off by the “leak” to the conservative Telegraph newspaper of a long  memorandum to the BBC Board written by one Michael Prescott. Prescott is a former political editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, a long-time corporate spin doctor, and until very recently one of two “external editorial consultants” to the BBC’s own Editorial Guidance and Standards Committee.

As is now notorious, Prescott called the Board’s attention to the way President Trump’s speech to his supporters on 6 January 2021 had been edited by the BBC’s Panorama program. Broadcast in the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential election, Trump: A Second Chance? had spliced together two short segments of the speech that were uttered 54 minutes apart.

Viewers were led to believe that in a single sentence Trump had told his audience to “walk down to the Capitol” and “fight like hell”.

As Prescott said in his memo to the Board: “This created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers.”

True enough. What no one has noticed is that Prescott did much the same thing in his memo.

This is what he wrote:

Fifteen minutes into the speech, what Trump actually said: “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” 

Reading that, the BBC Board might well have concluded that if Panorama had simply continued to run Trump’s first grab for another few seconds, his plea to his followers to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” could have been included.

But Trump did not say what Prescott said he said. As anyone who consults the transcript of Trump’s speech can readily see, there were five or six sentences between the first and second halves of what Prescott presented as a continuous grab.

All Prescott had to do was insert three dots: “and I’ll be with you…I know that everyone here will soon be marching” etc. But he didn’t. 

Admittedly, Prescott didn’t jump from one end of the speech to the other.  But he did “materially mislead” his readers. And no one has called him out on it.

Instead, the Chris Kennys of this world, on Sky News and in The Australian, have been obsessively poring over ABC programs that covered the same events, and accusing the likes of Sarah Ferguson of sins similar to those committed by Panorama.

Kenny claimed to have identified “an almost identical act of deception involving editing of the very same Donald Trump speech” in an ABC Four Corners episode, Downfall, aired in 2021. In that program, Trump was shown calling on his supporters to walk down to the Capitol building, “because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” 

But as ABC Managing Director Hugh Marks pointed out in a robust riposte, what the ABC did was omit two sentences from Trump’s speech, not 54 minutes. As Marks said, “the editing did not change the meaning of that section of the speech and did not mislead the audience.”

In fact, the ABC edited out fewer words from the original Trump speech than Michael Prescott omitted in his misleading memorandum to the BBC Board. Trump’s call for his followers to march “peacefully and patriotically” came after, not before, his call on them to “show strength”.  And the need to show strength, if not to “fight like hell”, was the essence of his long and inflammatory speech.

As Media Watch’s Linton Besser put it at the conclusion of a thorough examination of relevant ABC output, what we have seen in recent days is “a naked attempt to draw the ABC into a public broadcasting crisis 17,000 kilometres away, which smeared without foundation some of the ABC’s finest reporting.”

The fact that the anti-ABC forces in Australia have been so obviously piling on the pressure has made me reconsider what I wrote on November 11 in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

In that article, posted on the evening of Tuesday 11 November but mostly written on the Monday, soon after Tim Davie’s resignation, I was somewhat dismissive of the view that the crisis at the BBC was the result of a “political hatchet job”. I said that though Michael Prescott had worked for ten years for Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, he is “a reputable journalist, with no obvious hostility to the BBC.”

Well, maybe. Maybe not. On closer examination, many of the editorial judgments in his “dossier” are questionable. Many people who have viewed the Panorama program about Trump describe it as relatively even-handed. Prescott saw it as blatantly hostile to Trump. His view that the BBC was biased in favour of transgender people would certainly not be shared by many of those people themselves. And so on.

So how did Michael Prescott get the gig as an ‘external editorial consultant’ to the BBC’s powerful Editorial Standards Committee? Well, it appears that he was recommended for the job by his friend Sir Robbie Gibb, who was appointed to the BBC Board in 2021 by Boris Johnson. Gibb is a former BBC journalist, but in the past decade has been Prime Minister Theresa May’s Director of Communications, a consultant to the very right-wing GB News, and the head of a consortium that has bought the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish community’s most powerful newspaper and an outspoken critic of the BBC’s Middle East coverage.

As the former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, details in a long article for the UK’s Observer newspaper, Gibb has described himself as “a proper Thatcherite conservative”. According to Rusbridger, Gibb thinks that “the BBC is too woke by half, and his unrelenting mission is to cure it.”

Rusbridger is one of many knowledgeable observers – including former Sun editor David Yelland, and the BBC’s own Nick Robinson – who believe that the Prescott memorandum and its leaking to the Telegraph may indeed be a political hatchet job.

They are calling for a change in the BBC’s governance. The government should not be able to appoint directly five of the BBC’s thirteen-strong Board, they argue. Goodness knows what they would think of the governance of the ABC, six of whose eight Board members, including the Chairman, are appointed directly by the government. (The exceptions are the managing director, appointed by the Board, and the staff-elected director, currently journalist Laura Tingle.)

The ABC’s current historian, Margaret Simons – one of the most astute observers of Australian journalism – pointed out to Media Watch that “there have been times in the ABC’s past when its board has included political activists who were hostile to the ABC”. And she goes on: “It is terribly shortsighted to use a mistake, or even a series of mistakes, to attack the whole enterprise of public broadcasting.”

That’s the real parallel between the BBC and the ABC arising out of the Beeb’s current crisis – although I don’t agree with Simons that the current attacks on either organisation are short-sighted. The London Telegraph is not owned by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. But it shares the Murdochs’ decades-old hostility to the very concept of public broadcasting.

The BBC’s – and the ABC’s – enemies are playing a long game, and they will go on playing it.

The ABC’s friends should resist any temptation to take their fulminations seriously. Both the BBC and the ABC are indispensable and trusted news organisations, ever-more vital in an increasingly divided world.  They are not perfect. They make mistakes. When they do, they should fess up. But they are infinitely preferable to the unprincipled mob of screechers who routinely attack them in Britain’s overwhelmingly right-wing press, and here, in their sheltered workshop at Sky News after Dark.