'Huge mistakes? Acting disgracefully?' Some perspective please!I see that even Michael Gove thinks Trump should get.., er, think again, and that such a great British institution as the BBC should be defended by the government of the day against such spurious attacks. As for the substantive issue, the edit in Trump’s Jan 6th speech might have been clumsy, but it was a tiny part of a one-hour programme, which was a wide-ranging survey of Trump’s record to date. The BBC could have come out much earlier to explain this rather than moving straight into grovel mode. They might yet have their chance to do so in court! They could also have reminded the world that politicians’ speeches are always cut into short pieces, extracting the best 'soundbites', with no expectation of showing anything like the whole thing. They could also have conceded that, in this case, there might have been better ways of transitioning between two bits of a speech over 50 minutes apart, particularly where the time of day was critical to how events unfolded. The BBC could also have put some of the blame where it belongs, not solely on BBC staff but also on October Films, the independent company who actually made the programme. I wonder what their production team now thinks about how their simple oversight/lapse/bungle made more than a year ago could end up costing the BBC/licence payers $1bn!
Peter Evans ● 11d