STEPHEN GLOVER: Davie needed to go however who believes it is going to actually change the woke sect that the BBC has turn out to be?

Nearly a week has passed since we learned about a leaked report showing how BBC’s Panorama had doctored a speech by Donald Trump to make him say something awful that he hadn’t actually said.

For days the BBC didn’t respond to the shocking evidence contained in a dossier written by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the broadcaster on editorial issues. 

The Corporation’s bosses went to ground. Director-general Tim Davie might just as well have not existed.

Then, last night, he dramatically fell on his sword. So also did Deborah Turness, head of News and Current Affairs. Their resignations are amply justified. Whether they will cure the BBC of its very deep-seated malaise is another matter.

The refusal of BBC bosses to give a proper account of themselves has been extremely disturbing. Even more shocking has been the almost total failure of the Beeb’s journalists to refer to the controversy on its numerous radio and television bulletins until yesterday.

Without the Press, Davie and Turness would still be in their jobs. Without the scrutiny of newspapers, BBC chairman Samir Shah wouldn’t today be expected to deliver, at last, some sort of apology.

He will reportedly write a letter to the Commons culture, media and sport committee expressing regret for the way that Trump’s speech, made on the day of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots in Washington, was misleadingly spliced together.

Shah will attempt to stem criticism – including from the White House, which on Friday accused the broadcaster of ‘100 per cent fake news’ – by admitting that the Panorama interview ‘unintentionally misled viewers’.

Do they take us for fools? ­Notwithstanding the resignations of Davie and Turness, if this is the extent of the BBC’s apology, it will be an outrage. No one with a brain will accept that Auntie’s doctoring of President Trump’s speech was inadvertent.

No, it was calculating and deliberate. The episode of Panorama, shown eight days before last November’s presidential elections, appeared to show Trump urging his supporters to march with him on the Capitol ‘to fight like hell’.

In fact, he actually said he would accompany them to ‘peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard’. The ‘fight like hell’ comment came almost an hour later in the President’s characteristically rambling speech.

The splicing can’t conceivably have been accidental. If Mr Shah, who has a background in journalism, really does maintain that what happened was ­‘unintentional’, he will be digging an even bigger hole for himself and the BBC.

How can we explain the Corporation’s refusal to take full and immediate responsibility for egregious behaviour that it would have instantly condemned had it occurred in a newspaper?

Generous souls may be tempted to excuse Auntie on the grounds that she was shocked by the evidence that emerged six days ago, and has understandably taken a while to respond.

But the shameful facts were first presented to the BBC by Michael Prescott months ago. According to his account, he met a brick wall. Executives either could not accept that anything wrong had been done, or didn’t care.

The broadcaster wasn’t taken unawares last Tuesday when the Daily Telegraph first published excerpts from the dossier. Bosses knew perfectly well what Mr Prescott had up his sleeve.

I believe that their refusal to take his evidence seriously when he first presented it to them, or to respond promptly when it was made public, reveals a profound institutional arrogance.

The BBC is at the same time extremely powerful and convinced that its liberal-Left view of the world is the only one that deserves to be taken seriously. It believes that Trump is a wicked man, and therefore any attempt to misrepresent him must be morally justified.

It is of course possible to believe that he is a very flawed leader (as I do) without thinking that it is allowable to distort what he says. The BBC, however, is plainly determined to make him sound worse than he is.

An enormous effort has been required on the Beeb’s part for it even partially to concede that it has offended against fundamental journalistic values, and for it to plan a muted semi-apology.

I don’t doubt that some rank-and-file journalists at the Corporation do grasp that something rotten has occurred. But their misgivings haven’t been taken seriously by self-righteous bosses.

We had a glimpse of such thinking on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday morning, when senior presenter Nick Robinson finally acknowledged the controversy.

He accepted that there is ‘genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes’ but then talked about ‘a political campaign to destroy the organisation you are currently listening to’. 

How depressing that veteran BBC foreign affairs reporter John Simpson should have said that Robinson was ‘exactly right’.

This is the voice of entitlement. There is no political campaign to destroy the BBC. Many people are simply appalled by the dishonesty and lack of impartiality of our national broadcaster – which has still showed no contrition.

You’d think from the high-handed way in which Mr Robinson talks that the BBC is a private club authorised to organise itself as it wishes, and that licence payers have no right to object when it misbehaves.

It’s not just Trump, of course. Michael Prescott’s dossier plausibly alleges that the BBC Arabic service gave large amounts of space to statements from the terrorist group Hamas, making its editorial slant ‘considerably different’ to that of the main BBC website.

Many believe the broadcaster is guilty on its home ground of bias in its coverage of the Middle East. Today’s Daily Mail reports that more than 200 Jewish BBC staff have written to the Corporation’s board to accuse it of ignoring their plea for an investigation into anti-Semitism.

Mr Prescott’s dossier also suggests that a unit of rogue LGBT+ reporters is censoring coverage of the trans debate. BBC staff were reportedly part of a Pride group that lodged complaints about newsreader Martine Croxall’s response to a script referring to ‘pregnant people’.

In a news bulletin in June, she had the good sense to change the autocue from ‘pregnant people’ to ‘women’ live on air, and raised her eyebrow at the gender- neutral language.

Yet last week the Corporation’s Executive Complaints Unit upheld submissions from just 20 viewers suggesting that she broke BBC rules, and that her facial expression conveyed a ‘controversial view about trans people’.

It is barely credible. The same BBC that has taken six days to issue what will probably be a half-apology for corrupting a speech by the American President can find time to censure an employee for displaying common sense.

Tim Davie and Deborah Turness had no option but to resign. They presided over discreditable journalistic practices. They showed no shame over the Trump debacle. Surely the individuals responsible for ‘re-designing’ what Trump said should also go.

But which of us really believes that getting rid of Davie and Turness will fundamentally change the character of the BBC? Is it likely that the Corporation grasps the magnitude of its errors?

It increasingly resembles a wokeish metropolitan sect – rather than the national broadcaster it is supposed to be – reflecting minority views that aren’t shared by most of those obliged to pay for it.