How One Dumb Editing Move Could End the BBC

Totally ignoring the politics of all this, the decision to basically insert b-roll rather than a white flash to splice two sections of speech by President Trump together was monumentally dumb.

Am trying to think of a more consequential editing mistake than the one a BBC production team made on an episode of Panorama broadcast before the 2024 US Election.

Essentially they took two parts of a January 6 2020 speech by President Trump that were nearly an hour apart and spliced them together. A white flash is the current convention to splice two segments together and would have made it obvious that they came from different places in the speech. They're ugly but they're clear. However, the editing decision was to use a crowd shot for the transition instead.

Of course, whether you view it as a mistake or a deliberate falsehood lies at the heart of the resignations that have just taken place, not to mention the $1bn lawsuit that Trump is threatening the BBC with. Not getting into any of that here, believe us.

But here's the Guardian's side by side video of the edited speech and the original clip.

In an era of AI deepfakes and Sora2, it's almost weird to think that a simple transition in an editing suite is the possible smoking gun that could help bring about the end of a century old broadcasting institution.