Transcript - America This Week, Nov 13, 2025: "Far Beyond Trump: The BBC's Brutal Autopsy"

The BBC was meant to be the model for the anti-disinformation era, but England has become the world leader in failed propaganda. Also, "The Lord of the Flies" continues

Matt Taibbi: All right, welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Who is not feeling well. Is that right, Walter?

Walter Kirn: I’m feeling terribly. My karma for having yelled and screamed about the ostriches and about Jennifer Welch and so on has boomeranged, and I’m now speaking to you from behind an eight-inch thick headache that isn’t visible, but I can see it from my perspective.

Yeah, I’ve got all the symptoms of, I don’t know, early winter blues, first of all, but also sinus problems and headaches. So I’m going to really sit back here like a parking meter, because I feel about as conscious as a parking meter, and I’ll just ring up violations for the rest of the show.

Matt Taibbi: Well, that’s too bad because we have an interesting, what would normally be a fun topic for us.

Walter Kirn: Oh, it’ll tempt me and don’t worry.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So we’re going to do the BBC and we’re not going to look at it just from one angle, but let’s just start with what happened to turn BBC into a global issue this week. The overview, let’s look at SOT one.

Gordon Rayner: The BBC claims to be the pinnacle of impartial reporting, but what if there was an internal dossier that revealed that wasn’t the case? The Telegraph has seen a letter that reveals one of the BBC’s own independent advisors repeatedly warned that the broadcaster had serious and systemic problems.

A week before the US election, BBC Panorama released a documentary called Trump: A Second Chance, and in it, they played the following clip.

Donald Trump: We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.

Gordon Rayner: But Trump didn’t in fact say this at all. The BBC spliced together two clips that took place 54 minutes apart. So let’s go through it again.

Donald Trump: We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you.

Gordon Rayner: Now, see there. Between “Capitol” and “and,” that’s a cut. Here’s what Trump actually said.

Donald Trump: We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.

Gordon Rayner: It’s different. It wasn’t until nearly an hour later that he then said the second part of the BBC’s version.

Donald Trump: We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we fight. We fight like hell.

Gordon Rayner: Now, It’s true that a lot of people will still feel Trump’s claims that in 2021, the election was stolen were entirely inappropriate and unbecoming of a figure in politics. But irrespective of your personal views on Trump, the question remains, how is a national broadcaster funded by taxpayers on the premise that it’ll provide impartial reporting allowed to splice together content in a way that one of its own advisors said materially misled viewers?

And we’re not even done yet. The footage Panorama showed of the Proud Boys marching towards the Capitol building, seemingly spurred on by Trump’s rousing speech, well, that was actually taken before he’d even addressed the crowd. In fact, the BBC themselves later published a report.

Matt Taibbi: Let’s pause there because most people have probably only heard this part of the story, the Trump part of the story. For posterity’s sake, let’s look at number 24 and see what Trump’s reaction to this was.

Speaker 1: ... going ahead and suing the BBC?

Donald Trump: Well, I guess I have to. Why not? Because they defrauded the public and they’ve admitted it. And their top echelon-

Speaker 1: Director General and the CEO, both resigned.

Donald Trump: ... this is within one of our great allies. This is our supposedly a great ally, BBC. The government has a chunk of that one, I guess, but that’s a pretty sad event. They actually changed my January 6th speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical, and they actually changed it. What they did was rather incredible. They’re showing me the results later on, the results of what they did, how they butchered it up, but it was very dishonest, and the head man quit and a lot of the other people quit.

Speaker 1: We’re actually going to play it. But tonight you are saying to our viewers that you will go forward and file a defamation lawsuit against the BBC?

Donald Trump: Well, I think I have an obligation to do it because you can’t get people...

Matt Taibbi: Okay, so we get that. And just lastly, before we start discussing this whole thing, the chair of the BBC, Samir Shah, responded to this central allegation about the doctoring of this one article with a totally bizarre explanation. He’s talking about the review board, and he’s saying that they “heard from BBC News that the purpose of editing the clip was to convey the message of the speech made by President Trump so that Panorama’s audience could better understand how it had been received by President Trump’s supporters and what was happening on the ground at that time.”

So this is a classic instance of a news agency not showing you what happened, but showing you what it thinks the speech meant in the minds of the most radical viewers in the audience, which is kind of not the way it works, especially if you’re editing out lines like, “We’re going to walk down and peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” If you’re editing that part out, it’s significantly changed. This is way worse, in other words, than the 60 Minutes edit. This is a significant conscious decision.

So Walter, first of all, what’s your response to this whole thing

?