LONDON — The head of the BBC and the British broadcaster’s top news executive both resigned Sunday after criticism of the way the organization edited a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump.
The BBC said Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness had both decided to leave the corporation.
Britain’s public broadcaster has been criticized for editing a speech Trump made on Jan. 6, 2021, before protesters attacked the Capitol in Washington.
Critics said that the way the speech was edited for a BBC documentary last year was misleading and cut out a section where Trump said that he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
In a letter to staff, Davie said quitting the job after five years “is entirely my decision.”
“Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility,” Davie said.
He said that he was “working through exact timings with the Board to allow for an orderly transition to a successor over the coming months.”
Turness said that the controversy about 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.”
Turness served as the president of NBC News from 2013 to 2017. She served as president of NBC International from 2017 until leaving NBC in 2021.
Pressure on the broadcaster’s top executives has been growing since the Daily Telegraph newspaper published parts of a dossier compiled by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines.
As well as the Trump edit, it criticized the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues and raised concerns of anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s Arabic service.
The BBC faces greater scrutiny than other broadcasters — and criticism from its commercial rivals — because of its status as a national institution funded through an annual license fee of 174.50 pounds ($230) paid by all households with a television.
It also is bound by the terms of its charter to be impartial in its output, and critics are quick to point out when they think it has failed.
