TRUMP TAKES ON THE BRITISH DISINFORMATION COMPLEX:

The Trump administration has taken an interest in free speech in Britain as a cautionary tale of how the left’s obsession with policing “digital hate” and “misinformation” can lead to imprisonment for social media posts, as in the case of Lucy Connolly. The resignations over the weekend of two of the BBC’s highest executives, director-general Tim Davie and CEO Deborah Turness, are major victories in Trump’s war on Britain’s censorship complex.

Davie and Turness both resigned after revelations about the BBC’s bias against the President. Britain’s national broadcaster was exposed by the Telegraph for doctoring a speech Trump gave on January 6, 2021. The edited clip, which aired in a TV program a week before the 2024 election, made it sound like he was urging supporters to storm the Capitol, rather than telling them to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

The two snippets which were spliced into one – “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there 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” – occurred nearly an hour apart in the actual speech Trump gave. When BBC executives were presented with the now-leaked internal report, which voiced concerns about this program and other distortions in reporting, they ignored it.

Spiked editor Tim Slater mischievously asks, “Have you heard? There’s been a right-wing coup at the BBC.”

Apparently, a ‘cabal’ of ‘populists’ has just succeeded in ousting director-general Tim Davie and CEO of news and current affairs Deborah Turness. That, remarkably, is the high-status take following the shock resignations of Davie and Turness last night, following the outrageous, flagrant examples not simply of BBC bias, but of it pushing flat-out misinformation, detailed in an internal memo leaked to the Telegraph.

To call this a misreading of the situation is generous. It’s totally demented. BBC Panorama was caught out doctoring footage of Donald Trump’s ‘January 6’ speech, stitching together two bits, an hour apart, to make it appear as if he had explicitly incited the mob that later attacked the Capitol on that grim day in 2021. Unsurprisingly, the White House has taken a dim view of this – as has the British government. And yet our national, ‘impartial’ broadcaster being found to have spread lies about a politician – who we all know is loathed by those who work there – is being treated as if it’s a big fat nothing cooked up by a blood-scenting right.

It would be bad enough if the usual suspects were simply ranting – tinfoil hat at a jaunty angle – into their X feeds, like Belsize Park’s answer to Alex Jones. But they were also all over the BBC this morning. Former Murdoch newspaper man turned BBC podcaster David Yelland was on Today, airing his conspiracy theory that a ‘cabal of toxic plotters with links to the BBC board’ had ‘designed and executed a coup’, as he had put it on social media. When pressed, he couldn’t present a scrap of proof for this. But this claim was revisited time and again throughout the show.

At the London Times, Tom Peck describes this as something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The BBC announces the BBC has launched a coup against the BBC.

Traditionally, you know there’s been a coup when a man in military fatigues turns up on the state broadcaster to announce that there hasn’t been a coup.

So when the familiar voice of the state broadcaster, that of the BBC’s Nick Robinson, keeps waking you up at 7am to warn that a coup at the BBC is under way, you know it’s probably OK to go back to sleep.

Not just OK, but positively encouraged. If you try to actually understand what’s going on at the BBC you might not sleep again until you’ve sat in a dark room for quite some time, with a wet towel wrapped around your head.

All we can know for sure, at this point, is that the director-general, Tim Davie, and the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have resigned. Technically this was because last year, without anyone actually noticing until now, someone on BBC Panorama casually snipped out a minor, inconsequential, 50-minute-long segment of President Trump’s notorious speech on January 6, 2021, and welded together the front end and back end of what was left. What was broadcast was a cut-and-shut of a speech, which, with terrible inevitability, has now been involved in a horrific accident.

But it’s far more complicated than that. In fact if the BBC would like, at this point, to produce some genuine public service broadcasting, it could do worse than commission an eight-part series explaining the coup at the BBC, ideally featuring Professor Brian Cox, possibly standing on the slopes of a supervolcano on one of Saturn’s more hostile moons.

The main reason the coup is hard to understand is because the BBC is, according to itself, in on it. The implication from the BBC’s Nick Robinson, made live on the BBC Today programme, seems to be that the BBC’s Sir Robbie Gibb wants to bring down the BBC. Sensing opportunity, the BBC board, which gives the appearance of hating the BBC, wouldn’t let the BBC just admit it made a mistake and move on, and so the BBC has forced itself into full-blown crisis instead.

In one grim way, suddenly it all makes sense. For a lot of the last year, a lot of people have been looking at the BBC and just asking, why? Why did it accidentally have a documentary on Gaza narrated by the son of a Hamas official? Why did it accidentally broadcast an apparent Hamas rally live from the West Holts stage of Glastonbury? Well now we know. They were all in on it. Mission accomplished. Bob Vylan has pulled off the unthinkable.

Meanwhile back in the States, “none other than Brian Stelter weighed in on this weekend’s developments. Instead of looking critically at the actions that have ensnared these top-rung executives, Stelter tried to recast the editing as a mere error that somehow flummoxed those putting together this documentary, timed to be released just days ahead of the election.”

Stelter tweeted, “In a vacuum, a more-than-a-year-old editing misstep by unnamed producers would not cause the very top heads of the BBC to roll. But…”

This is the man who hosted Dan Rather for years on his CNN program titled “Reliable Sources,” so naturally, he’s perfectly fine looking the other way when it comes to the Beeb’s “editing misstep.”