Tim Davie ignored concerns about BBC Trump documentary – Dinenage

Tim Davie’s resignation as the director-general of the BBC is “very sad” but was “avoidable”, according to the chairwoman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Dame Caroline Dinenage said Mr Davie “ignored” concerns raised in Michael Prescott’s report over the way a speech by Donald Trump was edited for Panorama.

BBC chairman Samir Shah is expected to send a letter to the committee on Monday in which he apologises after the corporation was accused of misleading the public following claims that the speech had been selectively edited in the documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?

Dame Caroline told BBC Radio 4’s Today: “I’m very sad about Tim Davie stepping down. I think he was an effective leader at the BBC.

“I think he was a great champion for public service media, but there is no escaping the fact that he was very slow to act on this particular issue. But this isn’t the first time and on this particular issue, Michael Prescott’s report, he just didn’t take it seriously until it was too late.

“He should have reacted with concern and examined the claims, but just ignored it.

“But you know, I do feel it was entirely avoidable and it’s really regretful given the huge commitment to the BBC and public service that Tim Davie demonstrated.”

She added that she thinks it seems “a little bit odd” that her committee has not yet heard from Mr Shah.

The resignation of Mr Davie and chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, on Sunday followed days of pressure on the broadcaster over the matter.

A memo by Mr Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee, raised concerns in the summer about the way clips of the US president’s speech on January 6 2021 were spliced together to make it appear he had told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to “fight like hell”.

Critics said the documentary, broadcast by the BBC the week before last year’s US election, was misleading and removed a section where the US president said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

Mr Trump welcomed the resignations and claimed there had been an attempt to “step on the scales of a presidential election”, adding: “What a terrible thing for Democracy!”

Veterans minister Louise Sandher-Jones rejected suggestions the BBC was institutionally biased and told Sky News: “When you look at the huge range of domestic issues, local issues, international issues, that it has to cover, I think its output is very trusted.

“When I speak to people who’ve got very strongly held views on those, they’re still using the BBC for a lot of their information, it’s forming their views on this.

“I think we can all point to elements of BBC broadcasting of news and say ‘well, that reflects my views, and that doesn’t’ and that’s absolutely right, that we should be able to say that.

Asked about Donald Trump’s comments on the BBC, Ms Sandher-Jones said: “President Trump will obviously speak for himself.

“Tim Davie and Deborah Turness have been quite clear that it’s their decision that they’ve stepped down and I note that the board has thanked them for their service and had said that it had supported them.

“But they’ve, as they’ve said, taken accountability for what the BBC has put out. I think it is very important that public figures have accountability.”

Former Downing Street communications chief Sir Craig Oliver, who is also a former BBC news executive, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the BBC’s board has not properly defended the corporation.

He said: “What I think has gone wrong here, I think, is really an issue of the governance of the institution.

“We’re living in a fast-moving digital world where there are a lot of people who want to attack the BBC, and what we’ve seen is really a vacuum that has been created.

“It’s been obvious for days now that the BBC needed to step up, explain, apologise, move on.

“And what we’ve seen is the governance of the BBC saying, ‘we’ll get back to you on Monday – we’ll leave that for days. We’ll allow the President of the United States to be attacking the institution, and we’re not going to properly defend it’.”

David Yelland, who edited The Sun from 1998 to 2003, told the Today programme that the departure of Mr Davie and Ms Turness was “a coup, and worse than that, it was an inside job”.

He added: “There were people inside the BBC, very close to the board … who have systematically undermined Tim Davie and his senior team over a period of (time) and this has been going on for a long time. What happened yesterday didn’t just happen in isolation.”

He also described Mr Davie’s resignation as “a failure of governance”.

He added: “I don’t blame the chairman (Samir Shah) as an individual, but the job of the chair of any organisation, a company – including the BBC – is to keep their CEO, their top man or woman, in post or fire them.

“And that has not happened, because Tim Davie was not fired. He walked and so there was, that is the definition of a failure of governance.”

Lord Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, told Today the BBC must show it takes impartiality seriously.

He said: “First thing you have to do is admit you’re wrong instead of trying to defend yourself in this ridiculous way.

“All the BBC bias goes in one direction… the memo goes, it could go much, much further, but it’s about trans issues, identity, race, (US President Donald) Trump, Israel, Gaza… it’s always from a sort of metropolitan, left position, absolutely consistently. That’s how the bias is.

“So that means that it’s not serving a very large percentage of the licence fee-payers.

“I’m not, of course, saying that it should be right-wing either. I’m saying it should take impartiality seriously and put in people capable of running this gigantic and self-satisfied bureaucracy.”