The BBC consistently comes out on top as the most trusted news brand in the world - it holds that position in the UK, and it holds that position in the US as well. This is in a world where media, and news is increasingly polarised.
We can go to any number of news services that unapologetically come from a particular political bias - Fox News, Breitbart, GB News - there is no pretence that these are coming from anything other than a slanted angle. The same applies if I wanted to get my news from the Daily Mail, or the Telegraph.
In the US, news is so polarised that most of the population will only ever consume the sources that represent their own political views. This helps create bubbles who no longer have any shared reality or understanding of one another, they can each be fed completely contradictory world views and be convinced that their opposition isn’t just wrong, but morally repugnant.
This is a disaster for democracy and for the proper running of a country where everyone should feel represented, and where the ability to forge consensus across the political spectrum ought to be a given.
Fortunately we’re not quite there yet in the UK. People from all political persuasions still use the BBC, a fact which is pretty remarkable given the febrile times we are living in.
The standard the BBC is held to though is incredibly high - far higher than it is for the majority of its peers. The fact that it still manages to hit that standard as often as it does is something to be proud of in the UK. But as this situation shows, the BBC is surrounded by people who are constantly on the lookout for a reason, any reason, to attack it.
In this case the focus was on a 12 second excerpt from an hour long documentary produced for the BBC by an independent production company. No one seems to have suggested that the documentary was anything other than fair and balanced (as long as you watched the whole thing, and not just those 12 seconds). Even the Telegraph’s own reporting of the riots at the Capitol were quite clear that Trump’s speech played a role in inciting that violence - it is revisionist for them to now take the opposing side.
The editing of the clip showed bad judgment, and should have been picked up. It was also entirely unnecessary as the speech as a whole spoke for itself. My guess is someone junior on the production team did it, and no one above them spotted it. For that fuck up, the Telegraph now seems willing to try to feed the BBC to Trump - a man who has told more deliberate lies than most of us on here could manage over several lifetimes.
The BBC has many faults, and its handling of this has been pretty atrocious - but watching the Telegraph, Boris Johnson, Farage and Trump gleefully lining up to knife it is a pretty appalling spectacle, and not one that does any good for UK democracy.