BBC chairman apologises to licence fee payers over Trump documentary chaos

Chairman Samir Shah issued a public apology for the broadcaster’s editorial mistakes as he was grilled by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee today.

It comes after weeks of chaos at the corporation, sparked by a leaked dossier that levelled a slew of allegations against the BBC.

"I want to take this opportunity to apologise to all the people who care for the BBC.... the licence fee payer..... the staff," Mr Shah said.

"I regret the mistake that has been made and the impact that has had."

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Also addressing the Committee, Michael Prescott, a former editorial adviser whose leaked dossier sparked the resignations of top bosses at the BBC, told MPs the corporation is "not institutionally biased".

Mr Prescott had raised concerns about "despair at inaction by the BBC executive" over widespread evidence of alleged bias in a leaked 8,000-word memo sent to members of the BBC Board. 

The letter also accused the corporation of "effective censorship" of its reporting on transgender issues, and expressed concerns that BBC Arabic was downplaying the suffering of Israelis in the Middle East conflict.

He also raised concerns about the corporation's “doctored” Donald Trump speech which aired on an episode of Panorama and triggered the resignations of director general Tim Davie and BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness.

Mr Prescott said all the above are representative of “serious and systemic problems” at the heart of the corporation.

Pressure has also grown for BBC chairman Shah to resign over his handling of the situation - and he will be questioned by MPs on Monday along with fellow board members Sir Robbie Gibb and Caroline Thomson.

Speaking today, Mr Shah said he tried to stop Tim Davie from resigning.

Mr Shah said he thought the resignation of Deborah Turness, head of news, was a “very honourable act” and that it was right for her to “take responsibility for an error in her division”.

Mr Shah told the Culture, Media and Sport Committee: “I do not think the director-general should have resigned.

“I think that the act by the director of news was an honourable and proper act.

“I think she took responsibility, for which I will again say I applaud her for doing so.

“I do not think that that meant that the director-general also had to resign.”

Mr Shah said the board “wishes that the director-general had not resigned” and that he “had our full confidence throughout”.

Speaking earlier today today, Mr Prescott told the Committee there was “no party politics” behind his decision to write the memo.

He said: “I wrote that memo because I am a strong supporter of the BBC.

“The BBC employs talented professionals across all of its factual and non-factual programmes, and most people in this country, certainly myself included, might go as far as to say that they love the BBC.

“What troubled me was that during my three years on the BBC standards committee, we kept seeing incipient problems which I thought were not being tackled properly. And, indeed, I thought the problems were getting worse.”

He added: “There was no ideology at play here, no party politics. I just want (the BBC) to be impartial, accurate and fair.”

He told MPs he is a “centrist dad” when asked if he was biased and denied the BBC was institutionally bias.

He said: “I do not think it’s institutionally biased.”Referring to the “incipient problems”, he said: “We were finding the odd problem here, the odd problem there.

“And the crucial thing was, when I say odd problem here and there, every single thing we spotted, as per my memo, seemed to me to have systemic causes.

“The root of my disagreement and slight concern even today is that the BBC was not – and I hope they will change – treating these as having systemic causes.

“There’s real work that needs to be done at the BBC.”

Mr Prescott was asked if he agrees that Trump’s reputation might have been “tarnished” by the spliced edit of his speech in the programme.

In response, Mr Prescott said: “Probably not.”

He also told the Culture, Media and Sport Committee: “I can’t think of anything I agree with Donald Trump on.”

BBC board member Sir Robbie Gibb said the idea he led a “a broad-level orchestrated coup” at the corporation is “complete nonsense”.

It comes amid criticism the background of the board member, who was the director of communications for Theresa May when she was in Downing Street, could undermine the corporation’s independence and impartiality.

He told MPs on Monday: “It’s up there as one of the most ridiculous charges … it’s complete nonsense.

“It’s also deeply offensive to fellow board members who are people of great standing in different fields.“I am not even sure what the charge is, to be honest, and basically… it’s complete nonsense.”

On Friday, BBC board member Shumeet Banerji stepped down over what he described as "governance issues" at the top of the corporation.

He said in a letter that he was "not consulted" about the events that sparked the departures of Mr Davie and Ms Turness.

The top executives at the BBC left in the wake of criticism that a BBC Panorama documentary misled viewers by editing a speech by US President Donald Trump.

A leaked internal memo said an edition of Panorama broadcast last October spliced together two sections of President Trump's speech to give a misleading impression of what he actually said.

The damning 19-page dossier said the Panorama episode “completely misled” viewers by showing the President telling his supporters he was going to the Capitol building with them to "fight like hell".

Earlier this year, the broadcaster also made headlines at Glastonbury 2025 where it showed rap group Bob Vylan leading chants of "death, death to the IDF."

Mr Davie later told Jewish staff at the broadcaster he was “appalled” by the stunt.

In February 2025 the BBC broadcast the documentary 'Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone,' but it later emerged that its narrator, 14-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri, was the son of a Hamas minister, leading to accusations of "catastrophic failures."

In 2023, Match of the Day’s Gary Lineker made a controversial tweet in which he compared the wording in the British government's Illegal Migration Bill to Germany in the 1930s.