Quote:The events of January 6th, 2021, are still reverberating through American politics. While these events have been described by the legacy media as a riot or even as an insurrection, for the most part, it was nothing worse than hooliganism. But all that is still being sorted out, and among the things we are learning is that some legacy media outlets actively mislead their viewers and readers by deceptively editing President Trump's remarks from that day.

Case in point: The BBC. The UK Telegraph, in an exclusive story on Monday, broke the details.

The BBC “doctored” a Donald Trump speech by making him appear to encourage the Capitol Hill riot, according to an internal whistleblowing memo seen by The Telegraph.

A Panorama programme, broadcast a week before the US election, “completely misled” viewers by showing the president telling supporters he was going to walk to the Capitol with them to “fight like hell”, when in fact he said he would walk with them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.

Most of us on the political right here in the United States, or indeed anyone interested in, you know, facts, know what President Trump said on that day. We're all aware of the "peacefully and patriotically" admonition. Our own legacy media tried to fudge that sentence, to ignore it, but that's what he said.

The BBC appears to have deliberately edited that speech to hide those words.

The “mangled” footage was highlighted in a 19-page dossier on BBC bias, which was compiled by a recent member of the corporation’s standards committee and is now circulating in government departments.

The dossier said the programme made the US president “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” by splicing together footage from the start of his speech with something he said nearly an hour later.

It claimed senior executives and the BBC’s chairman had ignored and dismissed a string of serious complaints raised by the corporation’s own standards watchdog.

That's journalistic malpractice of the first water.

The BBC describes the program Panorama thusly:

Investigative documentary series revealing the truth about the stories that matter.

It's a bit hard to reconcile "revealing the truth" with "deceptively editing video to change the entire meaning of a political statement."

We're all too familiar with that sort of thing on this side of the pond as well. We might remember CBS News' deceptive editing of that infamous Kamala Harris interview, which was heavily edited to make her seem, well, coherent, rather than the word-salad-spewing mess she in fact was. That came out, and in any case, Kamala Harris lost the election, in no small part due to her laughable attempts at sounding erudite.

That's the best way to handle these kinds of attempts. Expose them. Publicize them. Spread the news of their malpractices far and wide. The BBC, granted, isn't an American network and is less concerned with what we may think than what British viewers might think. But that doesn't give them any license to fudge a major speech by a then-outgoing American president. The BBC has been known to be unfriendly toward the Trump administration, both 45 and 47. But one would think the least they could do is to present information honestly, to offer a fair, forthright, and factual viewpoint, "revealing the truth about the stories that matter."