Katie Razzall: A seismic moment shows a break at the top of the BBC

This is seismic. Losing the director general and chief executive of BBC News at the same time is unprecedented. It is an extraordinary moment in the history of the BBC.

It cannot be underestimated.

At first glance, Tim Davie’s resignation makes some sense.

For a while I wondered if I was weighing how much longer I wanted to stay in a high-pressure job.

There have been times when I interviewed him this year, as controversies escalated, and he didn’t seem like his usual Tigger self.

In his resignation statement he referred to “the intense personal and professional demands of managing this position for many years in these feverish times.”

My assessment is that the latest controversy seemed like too much after a succession of crises (two documentaries about Gaza, including the Bob Vylan Glastonbury issue) and there wasn’t enough fuel in the tank for another fight.

As former BBC communications chief John Shield told me, “the job of director general is one of the most difficult in public life.”

“It’s been relentless for him. He’s a very capable leader who has driven real change, but at some point it becomes unsustainably draining.”

I’m told there was still a real shock when Tim Davie shared his decision with his colleagues over the weekend.

Deborah Turness’s statement makes it clear that she has resigned as a matter of principle. While the ongoing controversy surrounding President Trump’s outlook is causing damage to the BBC, he said: “The responsibility is mine, and last night I made the decision to offer my resignation to the director general.”

But, as with any resignation, and certainly two, I can’t help but think there’s more to this than meets the eye. And another story is emerging about the functionality and composition of the BBC Board and its role in what happened.

There appears to have been a rift between the Board and the news division, with some arguing that the BBC has, for too long, failed to address institutional bias within the BBC and others questioning whether what has unfolded has been an orchestrated – and politicized – campaign against the corporation that has claimed two major scalps.

For the best part of a week, since the Telegraph first published its story, I have been unable to understand why the BBC did not step forward in the face of an avalanche of damaging headlines about claims of systemic bias.

I needed to split the accusations into two separate stories.

The first, about the editing of Trump’s Panorama speech, needed to be addressed immediately. Either with a quick apology, or even explaining why the BBC believed it had not misinterpreted the president’s words.

That would have allowed the BBC to fight more widely on behalf of its journalism. Remember, they were accusing him of institutional bias. Of a lack of impartiality. Accusations that go to the heart of their information operation.

With an apology for the error around the Panorama (or a strong defense), he could have attempted to refute the other claims about institutional bias.

It could have been said that the BBC had already been taking steps to ensure editorial impartiality and had already acted, for example, on BBC Arabic issues.

Instead, the BBC allowed the story to rot, and we ended up in a situation where the Trump White House was calling the BBC “fake news” and it had some traction.

As I understand it from multiple sources within the BBC, a statement on Panorama had been ready to be published for days.

The BBC planned to say about Trump’s edit that it had not intended to mislead the public, but that upon watching it again, it believed there should have been some kind of white flash or blurring, to make it clear to the public that these were two different parts of the speech.

I understand that Deborah Turness became increasingly angry and frustrated as the week went on because the Board prevented her from making that apology.

Instead, the BBC board decided that the way forward was to send a letter to the Sports and Cultural Media Committee.

Many, both inside and outside the BBC, see the lack of response as a serious mistake. The Telegraph’s drip-feed of accusations was damaging, and the BBC was not addressing them head-on.

I’m told Turness attended a board meeting on Thursday to discuss the crisis over the Telegraph stories and was left “devastated”, as some have described him.

Those who have questioned the BBC’s journalism would call it accountability.

But another source characterized it as the culmination of a “relentless critique of BBC journalism over two years by board members and advisers, all of whom come from the same political persuasion.”

They point to Robbie Gibb, a former BBC editor who left to become Downing St communications director for Theresa May and who is now a board member.

Former Sun editor and now BBC presenter David Yelland has called it “nothing less than a coup d’état”. It claims that the BBC Board has been undermined and that “elements close to it have worked with hostile newspaper editors, a former Prime Minister and enemies of public service broadcasting”.

But another former Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, had a very different opinion. Speaking on the BBC news channel, he said the resignations were “the right thing to do; this was a problem that was never going to go away”.

Editing of the speech, he said, could have led to Trump suing or the BBC being kicked out of the White House. “If you can’t be trusted on that [the speech of the US president] What can you trust?” he said.

And the American president himself has intervened in the debate for the first time. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he welcomed the resignations and accused the BBC of “manipulating” his speech and “trying to get on the scale of a presidential election.”

One line in Tim Davie’s statement stands out to me. He said this about the BBC: “We should defend it, not weaponize it.”

Tonight, some are wondering whether the resignations of both the CEO and the CEO of News suggest that the BBC has been used as a weapon.