The BBC deceptively edited video footage of President Donald Trump’s speech at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, to make it appear as if he encouraged attendees to riot, according to a whistleblower.
Legacy media outlets and Democratic politicians have been using the riot to attack Trump and his followers over the past five years. Democrats jumped on the opportunity to spread the false narrative that the president incited the violence. Now, it has been revealed that the BBC blatantly lied to its audience to smear Trump and his voters, according to a new report from The Telegraph.
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”.
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.
The doctored footage made it appear as if Trump said, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
However, BBC had cut out the statements Trump made, according to The Telegraph.
In reality, the first part of Trump’s speech: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you,” came 15 minutes into the speech. The second half of the sentence that was aired by Panorama, “and we fight. We fight like hell…” came 54 minutes later.
Fifteen minutes into the speech, 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.”
🚨The Telegraph and Panorama break the news that shockingly …
— Bernie (@Artemisfornow) November 3, 2025
The BBC “doctored” a Trump speech by making him appear to encourage the Capitol Hill riot!
WOW this is unbelievably bad from the home of facts! 🚨
Full article below. pic.twitter.com/bXCYw0ERNc
Michael Prescott, who compiled the whistleblower report and one of the editorial advisers in the news outlet’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) raised concerns about the edited footage and discussed the matter with David Grossman, the senior editorial adviser.
Prescott noted that “it turned out that Panorama had spliced together two clips from separate parts of his speech,” which “created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers.”
There was no indication in the video that the BBC had edited the clip for brevity or for another reason. Prescott described the edited footage as “completely misleading” and noted that the fact that Trump did not “explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.”
Of course, we already knew the media was lying about Trump’s role in the riot. Leftists often pointed to his “fight” comment as a smoking gun, even though plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle have used similar terminology. Nevertheless, the Democrats held onto the lie like a starving pit bull to a t-bone steak.
It’s great that this has finally been exposed. But without accountability, what reason do media outlets like the BBC have to tell the truth?