BBC chairman Samir Shah has apologized for a Panorama documentary that edited out a clip from a speech by US President Donald Trump, calling it an “error of judgement”.
“We accept that the way the speech was edited gave the impression of a direct call to violent action,” Shah said in a letter to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
Both the BBC’s director general and head of news resigned on Sunday following criticism that the program gave the impression that Trump explicitly encouraged the Capital Hill riots in January 2021 by stitching together two different parts of the speech.
The issue emerged in a leaked internal BBC memo published by the Telegraph newspaper last Monday.
Shah said the BBC had received more than 500 complaints since publishing the memo written by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee.
The edit had been discussed by the committee in January 2025 and May 2025 as part of a broader review of the BBC’s election coverage in the United States, Shah wrote, and Prescott and some committee members expressed concerns about it at the time.
Shah said they “also heard from BBC News that the purpose of editing the clip was to convey the message of the speech.”
This was so Panorama’s audience “could better understand how it was received by President Trump’s supporters and what was happening on the ground at the time.”
It was not pursued “as it had not attracted a significant audience response and had been aired before the US elections,” he explained.
He added: “In retrospect, it would have been better to take more formal measures.”
