Given the frequency with which Irish media outlets wax lyrical about the dangers of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’, it is truly astonishing that they’ve universally deigned to ignore one of the most outrageous cases of just that in recent memory: the exposure of the BBC’s manipulation of a Donald Trump speech to make it seem as though he directly encouraged the January 6 riot.
In case you missed it, which you very well might have with the national media nowhere to be found in relation to this particular violation of the truth, the Telegraph published something of a bombshell expose yesterday, revealing that an internal BBC whistleblowing memo they’d seen indicated that a Panorama programme had “doctored” a Trump speech by splicing two unconnected quotes together to give the appearance that he was inciting a riot.
From the Telegraph article:
“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 dossier seen by the Telegraph and compiled by a member of the broadcasting corporation’s standards committee on the topic of BBC bias, said that the Panorama programme made the US president “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” by stitching footage from early in his speech to words he said almost an hour later.
There was, at no point, any indication given to viewers that this manipulation had taken place – quite the opposite. Elements were arranged in a manner that would have left viewers with the wrong impression of the day’s events, which must constitute what establishment gatekeepers refer to as ‘misinformation’ at the very least, or more likely, ‘disinformation,’ being an active attempt at misleading the audience as it appears to have been.
This is all very curious, but curiouser still is the silence in our national media. We’re normally quick to pounce on the failures of our closest neighbour, and this one is a whopper. As pointed out in the Telegraph article, a similar, but arguably less malicious, incident took place in 2007 – ‘Crowngate’ – when footage of the late Queen Elizabeth II was edited to appear as though she had stormed out of a photoshoot.
For that, the controller of BBC One resigned, indicating the severity of the breach in trust the episode represented.
Additionally, misinformation and disinformation are the order of the day at present, making this a very strange one for our legion of public service sources, factcheckers and information verifiers to duck out on.
But I suppose they had their hands full.
Yesterday, while the rest of the anglosphere’s media outlets were busy reporting on this, our national broadcaster was considering a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Hope and Courage Collective (H&CC) that essentially found that people said incorrect things on the internet in the run-up to the presidential election.
Per RTÉ:
“A new investigation has found 172 instances of political misinformation and disinformation published on X, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube in the six weeks leading up to the Presidential Election on 24 October.”
Aside from the fact that I’d rate 172 instances of wrongspeak as pretty good in a country of 5.3 million or so, that this limp production took precedence over concrete evidence of structural rot at the heart of one of Britain’s central institutions is extraordinarily revealing.
There is, though, an obvious reason why this is so.
Our national broadcaster, and most of our national outlets, share the same editorial inclinations as the BBC, about Trump, and about most other things, too. The standards committee’s findings about the culture at the BBC would perhaps hit a little too close to home for those in Irish outlets that have taken broadly the same approach to Trump and any and all things non-liberal in recent years.
In a separate article, the Telegraph went through some of the whistleblowing memo’s other contents, many of which took issue with an allegedly blatant anti-Trump bias in the British Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the issues identified included amplifying rogue data favouring Trump’s 2024 opponent Kamala Harris, giving excessive coverage to Trump’s comments about people eating pets, and “dwelling too much on Harris campaign issues while failing to grasp issues that appealed to Trump supporters”.
In-depth BBC programmes were found to be “markedly anti-Trump/pro Harris,” the internal review being unable to “ find a single programme that looked more critically at Harris and her record than Trump”.
Leave Trump out of it – who doesn’t recognise the editorial tilt at play here? One might reasonably say that, egregious as it was, the doctored speech is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the way that mainstream outlets have attempted to shape public opinion in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere for many years now.
It’s why trust in media is falling and why, far from changing tack, media outlets are now circling the wagons and attempting to shore up their legitimacy with a renewed focus on gaining or maintaining approved status, whether through official State funding, or through designation as factcheckers or verifiers.
In the meantime, if the Telegraph’s story is indicative, the steady drip of liberal excesses will keep coming.