Donald Trump unleashes on BBC as director resigns over broadcaster's editing of his January 6 speech

The head of the BBC and the British broadcaster's top news executive have both resigned amid criticism of the way the organisation edited a speech by US President Donald Trump.

The BBC said director-general Tim Davie and news chief executive Deborah Turness had both decided to leave the corporation.

Britain's publicly funded national broadcaster has been criticised for editing a speech Trump made on January 6, 2021, before protesters attacked the Capitol in Washington.

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Critics said that the way the speech was edited for a BBC documentary last year was misleading and cut out a section where Trump said that he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

In a new post on Truth Social today, Trump blasted the BBC over the documentary.

"The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught 'doctoring' my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th," Trump's account posted.

"Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these Corrupt 'Journalists.' These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.

"On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!"

In a letter to staff, Davie said quitting the job after five years "is entirely my decision."

"Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility," Davie said.

He said that he was "working through exact timings with the Board to allow for an orderly transition to a successor over the coming months."

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Turness said that the controversy about the Trump documentary "has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC — an institution that I love. As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me."

"In public life leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down," she said in a note to staff.

"While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong."

Pressure on the broadcaster's top executives had been growing since the Daily Telegraph newspaper published parts of a dossier complied by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines.

As well as the Trump edit, it criticised the BBC's coverage of transgender issues and raised concerns of anti-Israel bias in the BBC's Arabic service.

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The 103-year-old BBC faces greater scrutiny than other broadcasters - and criticism from its commercial rivals - because of its status as a national institution funded through an annual licence fee of £174.50 ($353) paid by all households with a television.

The BBC airs vast reams of entertainment and sports programming across multiple television and radio stations and online platforms — but it's the BBC's news output that is most often under scrutiny.

The broadcaster is bound by the terms of its charter to be impartial in its output, and critics are quick to point out when they think it has failed. It's frequently a political football, with conservatives seeing a leftist slant in its news output and some liberals accusing it of having a conservative bias.

It has also been criticised from all angles over its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. In February, the BBC removed a documentary about Gaza from its streaming service after it emerged that the child narrator was the son of an official in the Hamas-led government.

Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, said that the BBC was full of "institutional bias," and "the new leadership must now deliver genuine reform of the culture of the BBC, top to bottom."

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