Did the bombshell BBC memo misquote the misquote?

Good morning. Stephen here. Alphaville’s Toby Nangle has very kindly offered to do today’s newsletter on the memo that plunged the BBC into crisis.

Subbing judice?

Two weeks ago the British public broadcaster lost its director-general, its head of news, was forced to retract a banner programme and made a fulsome apology to President Trump. As BBC crises go, it has been pretty special. The FCC said last night it is investigating whether the BBC documentary featuring that speech was aired in the US and whether it breached US regulations.

To be clear, the Beeb completely screwed up. As the leaked memo behind the clusterfarrago put it:

The spliced together version of Trump’s comments aired by Panorama made it seem that he said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be 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.”

In reality, the first part of Trump’s speech: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you,” came 15 minutes into the speech. The second half of the sentence that was aired by Panorama, “and we fight. We fight like hell…” came 54 minutes later.

What should it have said? According to Michael Prescott, a former BBC Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee adviser and author of the memo, what Trump actually said was:

We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

That seems . . . well, entirely different. All of us on Alphaville, the responsible finance blog, know the importance of providing a representative edit. And it’s clear that this particular edit was an error of judgment. Hence, resignations.

But when we went to fact-check this wording, we fell into a spot of bother. Weirdly, it looks to us as though the wording used by Prescott, the lobbyist previously appointed by Boris Johnson to select a new Ofcom chair, was itself an edit of Trump’s actual words (emphasis ours to try to match the Prescott quote):

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

Skipping the paragraph in which Trump tells his supporters that you can’t take the country with weakness and demanding that Congress count only some electors, may have been judged a neutral edit made for the sake of brevity. But it’s not an edit we would’ve made.

Now try this

This week Alphaville, the Financial Times’ snarky geeky and irreverent finance and economics blog, launched a Substack 🥳. If trying to understand humans through the prism of financial contracts that they magic into existence between themselves is your thing, you should definitely sign up. The first one goes out tomorrow.

We needed to make a launch video, and somehow along the way the Daicon IV Opening Animation entered the chat. As such, I spent much of the past week watching and rewatching this stunning short piece of 8mm 1980s Japanese animation, as well as exploring its back-story. (Toby)

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