Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has launched a fierce attack on the BBC, calling it “100% fake news” and a “leftist propaganda machine.” Her comments come amid growing allegations that the British broadcaster manipulated footage of a Trump speech in a BBC Panorama documentary.
Leavitt, a senior White House official in the Trump administration, claimed that watching BBC news bulletins during official visits to the UK “ruins” her day. She accused the publicly funded broadcaster of misleading viewers and forcing British taxpayers to “pay for bias and propaganda.”
The controversy erupted after UK lawmakers said the BBC had “serious questions to answer” about how a Panorama episode edited a portion of Donald Trump’s speech from January 6, 2021. According to a leaked internal memo, the documentary spliced two separate segments of Trump’s remarks, creating a misleading impression of his message to supporters before the Capitol riot.
The Panorama broadcast showed Trump telling supporters he would walk with them to the Capitol and urging them to “fight like hell.” However, it omitted the portion in which he urged the crowd to act “peacefully and patriotically.”
In her interview with The Telegraph, Leavitt said:
“This purposefully dishonest, selectively edited clip by the BBC is further evidence that they are total, 100% fake news. They should no longer be taken seriously by the people of the United Kingdom.”
She added that every time she visits the UK with the president, being “forced to watch BBC” in hotel rooms “ruins” her day because of what she called “blatant propaganda and lies” about President Trump and his efforts to make America “stronger and the world a safer place.”
The Telegraph based its report on a leaked memo written by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. The document reportedly criticized the editing of the Trump clip, saying:
“It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that he did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.”
The same 19-page dossier reportedly included Prescott’s concerns about BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Gaza war, alleging “systemic problems” and “stark differences” between the Arabic service and the main BBC website. Prescott is said to have raised issues about the frequent use of commentators with antisemitic or pro-Hamas leanings.
Additionally, the leaked memo criticized the BBC’s reporting on transgender issues, alleging that the organization had been “captured by a small group of staff” aligned with the Stonewall view of gender identity. It claimed that BBC’s LGBT desk routinely ignored or suppressed stories that questioned transgender policies, instead offering “a constant stream of one-sided narratives.”
In response, a BBC spokesperson said:
“While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully. Michael Prescott is a former adviser to a board committee where differing views and opinions of our coverage are routinely discussed and debated.”
The dispute has reignited a wider debate about media bias, political neutrality, and the accountability of publicly funded broadcasters, especially as the BBC faces renewed scrutiny over its coverage of politically sensitive topics in both the UK and abroad.
