Farrukh Dhondy | With Pot Calling the Kettle Black… Trump & BBC in War of Credibility

“In the twilight

As I stare at the pink sunset

Through the dry branches of autumn trees

An imagined sight

Accompanied by the pang of regret

Accosts my being, a faint unease…

Nothing we do is absolutely right

Nothing ever new disturbs human sight

We are shadows, my dear…

We disappear with the fading of the light.”

From Dharmatology, by Bachchoo

The satirical magazine Private Eye has invented a monitoring device called the “IronyMeter”. It measures the depth of the colour when the pot calls the kettle black. Today the instrument, pointed at London and Washington, is bound to get overloaded and explode -- the latter because President Donald Trump’s spokeswoman, one Karoline Leavitt, has gone on social media to label the BBC “100 per cent fake news”.

She is commenting on a broadcast which has triggered the resignations of Tim Davie, the BBC’s chief executive, and Deborah Turness, its head of news.

The BBC, just before the election of Mr Trump for his second term, had in October 2024 transmitted a documentary featuring his speech to the mob that attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The programme is accused in the national press of deliberate bias as it edited out Mr Trump’s initial words to his mob saying they were marching together peacefully on the Capitol to persuade the Electoral College to accept that the election of Joe Biden was rigged and to declare Mr Trump President.

Later on, in the same speech, Mr Trump had used the words “fight and fight like hell”. The Panorama programme cut the introductory phrase about a peaceful persuasive march and went straight to the “fight” phrase. Certainly, the impression that any viewer of this BBC programme would take away was that Mr Trump was urging the mob to fight.

He had indeed used the “fight” phrase at the end and the mob didn’t take it metaphorically. It proceeded to take the word literally and did precisely that!

Some of them were dressed in aggressive gear, such as horned Viking caps.

They shouted nasty slogans and stormed the Capitol with weapons and batons.

Mr Trump’s speech had certainly incited this mob to the violence that followed. The opening stuff about peaceful marches was hypocritical subterfuge and proved to be just that.

Five deaths ensued, one of a mobster shot by the Capitol police and the other of a policeman who died of a stroke. A third of drug abuse and two more of natural causes triggered by their storming assault.

Vice-president Mike Pence, who didn’t support Mr Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election, had to have heavy police protection and go into hiding as some of the mob were determined to punish him in some way for not standing by Mr Trump’s fake claim.

The Panorama documentary was undoubtedly edited to give the impression that Mr Trump had instigated the mob to this attack on the Capitol. There was nothing “peaceful” about the assault. So, the documentary may be guilty of a technical sleight of its editing hand, but not of falsifying the effect that Mr Trump’s very self-conscious address had.

After January 6, Mr Trump persisted in his fake “rigged election” claim. He expressed no regret for the attack on the Capitol and now has pardoned the criminals who were convicted for their actions that day. Does that indicate support for the mob action? Is the Pope a Catholic?

So, Ms Leavitt, who, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, was “dancing on Tim Davie’s grave”, while ignoring the fact that her hero is a convicted felon, a persistent liar and perpetrator of the most outrageous “fake news” -- (immigrants eating American pet cats and dogs?)

One consequence of this incident, which is really a storm in a teacup, but has been treated nationally and internationally as a universally destructive hurricane, is that the right-wing lobby in the UK that wants the BBC shut down by abolishing the TV licence fee which funds it, are seeing it as a nail in the corporation’s coffin. The “IronyMeter’ is similarly overloaded in London: Prominent dailies like The Telegraph and The Mail, both full of right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theories, accuses the BBC of bias???

Liz Truss, whose 49-day-UK-premiership shafted the economy, says the Beeb has done damage to the country???

Boris Johnson says the Beeb tells lies???

The other disgusting consequence is that the right-wing commentators are now crowing that the BBC’s coverage of the misery in Gaza is “fake news”. It would be no surprise if the Spectator and The Telegraph publish columns claiming that the footage we constantly see of the bombed rubble of Gaza’s cities is generated by AI; or that the footage of starving Palestinian mobs are all actors paid by the BBC. Or how about: the IDF is not bombing the hospitals and schools in Gaza – it is only dropping peppermints and daisy chains??

There is the opposing point of view. Even some close friends of mine say that they won’t tune in to the Beeb because it’s absolutely biased towards Israel and against Palestine.

The legal injunction to all broadcast channels is to be objective and unbiased in their coverage of politics. To my mind, the BBC comes closest to obeying this injunction, whereas very many of the petty channels in the UK are dedicatedly right-wing with presenters such as Nigel Farage, the leader of what can only be labelled the contemporary National Socialist movement in Britain, the Reform Party.