Tim Davie
Profile
Director-General of the BBC from September 2020 until his resignation on 9 November 2025 — forced out by the Panorama Trump speech-editing scandal. Davie presided over the BBC during a period of cascading editorial failures: the Panorama documentary "Trump: A Second Chance?" (broadcast 28 October 2024, one week before the US presidential election) was found to have spliced two sections of Trump's January 6, 2021 speech taken 54 minutes apart, removing Trump's explicit call for supporters to demonstrate peacefully and manufacturing the false impression of a direct incitement to violence. The scandal was exposed by a leaked internal memo from BBC standards adviser Michael Prescott, published by The Telegraph, which described "serious and systemic bias" at the corporation. Davie claimed ultimate responsibility and resigned alongside BBC News CEO Deborah Turness. Trump described both as "very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election." Davie's tenure also encompassed the Bashir/Diana cover-up inquiry, the Huw Edwards scandal, OFCOM impartiality findings, and the Hamas Gaza documentary narrated by the son of a senior Hamas official — a pattern of institutional editorial misconduct on his watch.