Two senior bosses at the BBC have resigned following accusations of “serious and systemic” bias in news coverage by the public broadcaster.
While criticisms of the corporation’s editorial standards have been mounting for some time, it most recently came under fire over the way in which a speech by US President Donald Trump was edited.
In shock announcements on Sunday, BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness announced their resignations.
Here’s a look at what has happened and how the bosses responded.
The storm over Mr Trump’s speech began last week when The Daily Telegraph published parts of a dossier on impartiality concerns.
The “internal whistleblowing memo”, which the Telegraph later published in full, had been sent to the BBC’s editorial standards board.
The author, Michael Prescott, had worked as an independent advisor to the board for three years until June 2025, but departed with what he said were “profound and unresolved concerns”.
Mr Prescott was the political editor for the Sunday Times — a Murdoch-owned outlet — for 10 years.
He opened the memo by saying the concerns were serious enough for him to bring them to the board’s attention.
The BBC had “repeatedly failed” to address issues he raised while in the role, and “in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all”, he said.
Mr Prescott went on to detail a string of concerns around bias in the corporation’s reporting.
The memo discussed findings from reports into four areas of coverage — the US presidential election; racial diversity; biological sex and gender; and Gaza.
But it was the corporation’s reporting in a documentary on Mr Trump that was the focus of backlash in the ensuing days.
According to the Telegraph, Mr Prescott was concerned by an hour-long special of the BBC’s investigative documentary series Panorama, which aired a week before the presidential election last year, titled Trump: A Second Chance?
The special showcased interviews with a set of Mr Trump’s supporters and attempted to unpick the factors behind the president’s popularity.
In his memo, Mr Prescott discussed a review into the special, which was ordered after concerns about its impartiality were raised internally.
The review found Panorama had used an edited clip of Mr Trump speaking at his rally on January 6, 2021 — the day a mob of his supporters would later attack the US Capitol building.
It appeared to show Mr Trump as saying: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
But the clip had been created by splicing together two points of his speech that occurred almost an hour apart:
Mr Prescott said the edited clip “materially misled viewers”.
“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,” he wrote.
He also said the report found Panorama had distorted the order of the day’s events by incorrectly implying members of the far-right group Proud Boys had only begun marching to the Capitol after Mr Trump had finished speaking.
“This created the impression Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call-to-arms,'” he said.
The memo alleged when the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee met on May 12, senior editor Jonathan Munro asserted it was “normal practice to edit speeches into short-form clips”.
The memo went on to criticise the BBC’s coverage of US politics in other areas, too.
Mr Prescott accused the corporation of “repeatedly” misrepresenting comments Mr Trump made about former politician Liz Cheney in an interview with conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson on October 31, 2024.
He listed a further eight points detailing “wider concerns” about the corporation’s reporting on the US, which included “excessive coverage” of a single opinion poll and an “over-emphasis” on certain events such as Mr Trump’s comments about Haitian migrants eating pets.
The Daily Telegraph followed its story with a daily drip feed of headlines and interviews covering reactions to the leaked memo.
Other media outlets began to pick up the story, with a focus on the altered comments from Mr Trump’s January 6 rally.
“I’ve got news for the BBC bosses who think they’ll get away with fabricating a damaging Trump quote: A huge storm is coming”, a column published by the Daily Mail was headlined.
Former British prime minister Boris Johnson added his voice to the backlash, appearing on the Telegraph’s front page on Friday.
He called for Mr Davie to “explain or resign”, and in his column the following day, added an ultimatum, saying he would stop paying the BBC licence fee.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt labelled the corporation “100 per cent fake news” and said British taxpayers had been “forced to foot the bill for a leftist propaganda machine”.
Mr Davie and Ms Turness announced their resignations in separate emails to BBC staff at 6pm on Sunday, almost one week after the memo was first published.
A BBC article said the corporation was due to issue an apology on Monday.
In his statement, Mr Davie acknowledged the BBC was “not perfect”, but said it must remain transparent and accountable.
“While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision,” he wrote.
“Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Mr Davie said he was working through “exact timings” of his exit with the corporation’s board.
“I hope that as we move forward, a sensible, calm and rational public conversation can take place about the next chapter of the BBC,” he said.
Ms Turness noted that the ongoing controversy had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC”.
“In public life, leaders need to be fully accountable and that is why I am stepping down.”
She went on to emphasise while mistakes had been made, allegations that BBC News was institutionally biased were incorrect.
BBC chair Samir Shah also released a statement to staff in which he thanked Mr Davie and Ms Turness for their leadership.
“I fully understand this is unsettling for all of us, but I remain resolute that the BBC will continue to deliver world-class public service broadcasting in the days, weeks and months ahead,” he wrote.
The next director general will be appointed by the BBC Board, which has had its own share of controversy in the past.
The chair and non-executive board members are appointed by King Charles on the recommendation of ministers.
Mr Shah co-authored a report commissioned by the government in 2021 that concluded the UK was not institutionally racist.
Non-executive director Robbie Gibb was former Tory prime minister Theresa May’s director of communications from 2017 to 2019.
