The head of the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and a top news executive resigned from the organisation on Sunday after a memo criticising the editing of a 2021 speech by US President Donald Trump shortly before protesters stormed the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, was leaked.

The BBC said Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness had chosen to step down after the memo became public.

The memo was from ex-adviser Michael Prescott, a former journalist who was an independent consultant to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board for three years before leaving in June. He claimed that editors of a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary had spliced two parts of Trump’s speech together so it appeared that he had actively encouraged the Capitol Hill riots of January 6, 2021, which followed his 2020 election defeat.

Trump responded to the pair’s resignation on Sunday night, calling Davie and Turness “very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a presidential election”, in a post on his Truth Social platform.

Davie said he took “ultimate responsibility” for mistakes made, and had decided to resign after “reflecting on the very intense personal and professional demands of managing this role over many years in these febrile times”.

What is at the centre of this?

The resignations of Davie and Turness followed controversy over a BBC Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?”, which was broadcast one week before the 2024 US presidential election.

A clip from the programme appears to show two different parts of Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech joined together into one sequence. In the episode, Trump is shown as saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

But according to a transcript from Trump’s comments that day, he said: “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.”

Nearly an hour later, Trump then used the phrase “we fight like hell”, but not in reference to the protesters at the Capitol. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said.

Who are Tim Davie and Deborah Turness?

Tim Davie became director-general of the BBC in September 2020. He was responsible for overseeing the organisation’s editorial, operational and creative work. He previously led BBC Studios for seven years and worked at companies including Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo.

In an email to staff on Sunday, Davie said quitting the job after five years “is entirely my decision”. He said he was “working through exact timings with the Board to allow for an orderly transition to a successor over the coming months”.

Meanwhile, Deborah Turness had been the CEO of BBC News since 2022, leading a team of around 6,000 employees broadcasting to almost half a billion people around the world. She was previously CEO of ITN and president of NBC News.

Over the weekend, Turness said that the controversy over the Trump documentary “has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC – an institution that I love. As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me”.

“In public life, leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down,” she said in a note to staff. “While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”

David Yelland, former editor of the Sun newspaper, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday that Davie and Turness were the victims of a “coup”. However, both they and the BBC deny this.

How has the White House responded?

The incident prompted criticism of the BBC by Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, who described the corporation over the weekend as “100 percent fake news” and a “propaganda machine”.

For his part, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are ’ll quitting/FIRED, because they were caught “doctoring” my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th”.

He added that “very dishonest people” had “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election… On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for democracy!”

What else has the BBC been accused of?

Prescott’s leaked memo did not only refer to the Panorama editing of Trump’s speech. It also focused criticism on a number of other areas of the BBC’s work, such as its coverage of transgender issues and racism – which he said were “one-sided” and “ill-researched” – but most notably its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Prescott accused the BBC of anti-Israel bias within the BBC Arabic service, claiming that contributors over-emphasised stories that were critical of Israel. He also accused the wider corporation of “misrepresenting” the number of women and children killed in Gaza and the issue of Palestinian starvation in the besieged enclave.

The former BBC adviser said he had sent the memo in “despair at inaction by the BBC Executive” over these and other issues.

Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing broadsheet newspaper in the UK, accused the BBC of “the most extraordinary degree of systemic bias, particularly in BBC Arabic” in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

On general news, he told the Today programme, “it’s always [reporting] from a sort of metropolitan left position. Absolutely consistently, that’s how the bias is.”

The BBC denies that it is institutionally biased, however.

Why has the BBC’s Gaza coverage been accused of bias?

In February, the United Kingdom’s media regulator Ofcom said a BBC documentary about Palestinian children living through Israel’s war on Gaza broke rules on impartiality, as it was narrated by the 13-year-old son of a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run government.

Five days after it was broadcast, the BBC removed the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone from its online streaming platform. In July, the BBC’s own investigation found that the programme had breached its editorial guidelines on accuracy.

But the BBC has also been accused of being biased in favour of Israel.

In November, the organisation was accused by more than 100 of its own staff of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the war on Gaza, and criticised its lack of “accurate evidence-based journalism”.

An internal letter, signed by more than 100 anonymous staff at the BBC, was sent to Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, stating: “Basic journalistic tenets have been lacki’g when it comes to holding Israel to account for its actions.”

Karishma Patel, one journalist who quit the BBC over its Gaza coverage, told Al Jazeera: “It is absurd that Panorama’s editorial blunder over Trump’s speech was the final straw for the Director-General and CEO – rather than the worst moments in the BBC’s Gaza coverage across two years: its refusal to air the Gaza medics documentary by Basement Films, significant broadcast of Israel’s defence and not South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ, public letters signed by BBC journalists concerned about the organisation’s Gaza coverage, some of which I personally organised.

“There have been many crucial moments where we have seen no real accountability and no real change, eroding public and staff trust.

“It is very clear that criticisms are only taken seriously if they come via the right wing press, and this influence has shaped the BBC.

What other controversies has the BBC faced in recent years?

The BBC, which is funded by a mandatory licence fee payable by all households in the UK that own a television, has long been accused by rival media organisations and politicians of failing to maintain a commitment to impartiality in its coverage of global news and events and of having a “liberal” bias.

In March 2023, the BBC struggled to contain a scandal over the opinions of Gary Lineker – a former professional footballer and its highest-paid sports presenter – on immigration. He was ultimately removed as a presenter of BBC’s Match of the Day show after he criticised the UK government’s asylum-seeker policy, briefly leading to a walkout by some of his colleagues in a show of solidarity.

In May 2025, controversy over Lineker was reignited after he shared an Instagram post about Zionism that included a drawing of a rat, which critics claimed was an anti-Semitic insult.

In response, Lineker said: “I recognise the error and upset that I caused, and reiterate how sorry I am.” The BBC said he would leave the organisation altogether.

Elsewhere, the BBC has faced lasting reputational damage following revelations that its former TV presenter Jimmy Savile perpetuated decades of sexual abuse, which came to light after his death in 2011.

Posthumous investigations revealed that Savile had exploited his celebrity status and access to BBC facilities to abuse hundreds of victims, many of them children, while complaints to the corporation about his behaviour were ignored and even covered up.

More recently, the broadcaster was again rocked by allegations involving one of its main news anchors, Huw Edwards. In 2023, Edwards was accused of paying for up to 41 sexually explicit images he had received on WhatsApp, some of victims aged between seven and nine years.

The case reignited scrutiny over how the BBC handles staff misconduct, reviving painful questions about trust and oversight within the institution, which eventually admitted that it should have responded to complaints much faster.

What does this latest crisis mean for the future of the BBC?

Sunday’s resignations come at a sensitive time for the BBC, as the government is set to review the corporation’s Royal Charter before the current term expires in 2027.

The Royal Charter sets out the terms and purpose of the BBC’s operations, and normally lasts for about a decade each time it is renewed.

UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, who has previously called allegations of bias “incredibly serious”, said a review of the Charter by the government would help the BBC “adapt to this new era”.

Jonah Hull, reporting for Al Jazeera in London, said “this is a hugely significant moment for the BBC … arguably the most famous news media brand, built on a reputation of journalistic integrity and impartiality”.

In addition to the recent scandal over the misleading editing of a Trump speech, Hull said the BBC had also suffered criticism for its coverage of “trans-rights issues, Israel bias … all of which has led to a furore of criticism aimed at the BBC”.

BBC Chair Samir Shah, who apologised for an “error of judgement” over the editing of Trump’s speech in the Panorama programme on Monday, but denied that the BBC is guilty of systemic bias, is due to lay out a vision for the BBC’s future on Monday to Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

At the daily briefing for journalists at 10 Downing Street on Monday, the prime minister’s spokesman also said he does not believe the BBC is “institutionally biased”. (BBC)