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The sudden resignations this week of BBC director-general Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness has focussed minds on the role of the media. It has been startling – and grimly predictable – to watch senior figures at the BBC scrambling to defend their failures by muttering darkly about ‘right-wing conspiracies’ and ‘inside jobs’. Few, if any, have paused to consider whether the real problem might be their own cowardice.
The same rot runs through mainstream media across the world. In Ireland, I’ve met too many well-paid figures at RTÉ, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent who seem serenely proud of their refusal to touch anything remotely controversial. I call it Hugh Linehan syndrome, since, as duty editor of the Irish Times and host of the popular Inside Politics podcast, he appears to be particularly self-satisfied, even self-righteous, about his ability to avoid difficult issues.
– Stella O’Malley
This tweet from “GnasherJew” includes a video clip from a lecture on “The Birth of Zionism” given by Dr Samar Maqusi for the group “UCL Students for Justice in Palestine” on 11th November 2025. Dr Marqusi is currently Research Associate at University College London’s Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL). (“Her work looks into the politics of space-making inside the Palestine refugee camps. More recently, she has been investigating modes of sociality and vitality in refugee camps inside a burdened Lebanon. Previously, Samar worked with UNRWA (UN Agency for Palestine refugees) as an Architect/Physical Planner, focusing on programmes of shelter rehabilitation and camp improvement.”)
Update: It looks like I pressed “publish” too soon. Never mind, you can enjoy seeing this post made in real time. Watch the video clip. It shows an academic in University College, London (UCL) spreading the blood libel. For anyone new to the term, a blood libel is a specific sort of anti-Jewish propaganda in which Jews are said to have murdered Christians for ritual purposes, often including baking their blood into bread. The genre goes back to the thirteenth century cult of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. The spreading of such tales is usually the precursor to a pogrom, as it was in Lincoln in 1255.
Dr Samar Maqusi said this to her students the day before yesterday:
Now 40 years later, in about 1838, there was something called the “Damascus Affair”. Uh, what happened is, there is, um, a priest, a Christian priest called Thomas. He disappears, um, in Damascus during what is called the feast of Tabernacles. So, this is a Jewish feast, and the story goes – and, you know, again, these are things that you read again and again. As I said, do investigate, draw your own narrative. But the story is that during this feast they make this, um, special pancakes, or, um, bread. And part of the holy ceremony is that drops of blood from someone who’s not Jewish, which the term is “gentile”, has to be mixed in that bread. So, the story is that, um, a certain investigation was undergoing to try and find where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered and a group of, of Jews who lived in Syria said that, you know, admitted to kidnapping and murdering him to get the drops of blood for making, uh, the holy bread.
This one is known as “the Damascus Affair” or “the Damascus Blood Libel”. It’s famous enough to appear in lists of historical blood libels. I wasn’t expecting to see it related as fact in 2025 in one of the top ten universities in the world. Like every conspiracy theorist ever born, Dr Maqusi peppers her speech with literal and metaphorical “uptalk”, little get-out clauses such as “the story goes” and “draw your own narrative”, so that if challenged she can claim to be “just asking questions”. But she felt safe enough to speak as she did, and, with the delayed exception of whoever recorded her, her student audience did not challenge her.
As ever, I do not seek to use the law to silence Dr Maqusi. I want it made clear to all how common and accepted her views are among the pro-Palestinian movement, and among Palestinians. I do think that unless UCL takes action their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy will be revealed as an empty sham, but if that is the case I would rather know about it.
Update: Dan Souter points out in the comments that UCL has apologised and Dr Maqusi’s profile has been removed from the UCL website. The link is to an article by David Rose in Unherd. I commend the Provost’s decisive action to protect his university’s reputation, but I do find it disquieting that in just five years universities across the English-speaking world went from beating their breasts in penitence for the most minuscule and indirect manifestations of racism – here is UCL’s 2020 statement on Black Lives Matter and here is an account from its website of how it “denamed” buildings named after a couple of Victorian eugenicists because seeing the old names has “a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have” – to this.
That is certainly one way of putting it. Another is that, first, the Trump stuff is much less important than the BBC’s issues in other areas and that it seems modestly significant that Goodall devotes almost no space at all in his lengthy Substack piece to any of those issues. Secondly, at no point does Goodall bother considering whether some or any of the criticisms made by Prescott and Grossman have any validity at all.
That, however, seems a necessary starting point.
News judgement is often a nuanced and complex business. News “values”, on the other hand, should be comparatively straightforward. This is where it is entirely reasonable to convict the BBC’s coverage of the sex & gender wars. For here the corporation largely – though with notable exceptions, especially Hannah Barnes on Newsnight – picked a side and chose the one that required BBC journalists to sacrifice their judgement. Ideology trumped basic news values. They said it was dry when in fact it wasn’t obviously dry at all.
For once again, among the most important of those values is this eternal question: Is This True?
– Alex Massie
There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling. This story is going to run and run and run 😀
As for its content, Simpson’s post summed up the BBC on several levels. Firstly, that its most senior journalists are simply unable to see the world as ordinary people see it. Politically motivated attack? Mate, the BBC literally edited footage. This was no innocent error; as Janet Daley put it, this was “a professionally crafted editing job which has to have been designed to produce a calculated effect for a political purpose”. Your bleating is only making it worse.
Secondly, that the BBC considers a Left-of-centre worldview to be the definition of objectivity. The Guardian is its ideological ally because both assume they are the privileged holders of sanity, grown-up thinking and the truth, which must be defended against the fascist hordes. When the chips are down, the BBC won’t even bother to hide it.
Thirdly, that any criticism of the broadcaster represents a bad-faith attempt to destroy a great socialist project that aims to redistribute the news to each according to his needs. Here lies the kicker: in pushing such a conspiratorial Leftist worldview, the doughty journalists of the BBC have apparently dispensed with the need for evidence.
– Jake Wallis Simons (£)
The day before yesterday I wrote, “Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.”
One example is Adam Boulton. He is the former political editor of Sky News, among many other prestigious roles, and currently presents on Times Radio. Regular readers may recall that in 2023 he told BBC Newsnight that GB News should be shut down in order to protect the UK’s “delicate and important broadcast ecology”. Boulton’s response to the crisis at the BBC was this tweet:
Adam Boulton
@adamboultonTABB
For the record No words were put into Trump’s mouth. The quotes were him saying what he said.
9:36 AM · Nov 9, 2025
(Hat tip to the science fiction author Neal Asher.)
People in the replies to Boulton’s tweet have a lot of fun snipping out parts of what he said in order to reverse its meaning. But it is not really that funny. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Adam Boulton is lying to you; assume Adam Boulton would lie about you.
Another journalist whose own words demonstrate that he thinks it is fine to use selective quotation to lie to his readers is Mikey Smith, Deputy Political Editor of the Mirror. Back in the days when he was Michael Smith, Mikey worked for Sky News and the BBC. On November 9th, he tweeted this:
Mikey Smith
@mikeysmith
It’s not an assault on the BBC. It’s an assault on facts.
The edit was only remotely a problem if your position is that Trump played no part whatsoever in encouraging January 6th. Which he plainly and obviously did.
7:37 PM · Nov 9, 2025
Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Mikey Smith is lying to you; assume Mikey Smith would lie about you.
Still, perhaps I was a little harsh about journalists in general in my earlier post. Sure, there are plenty of outright liars in the media, and plenty of people who upvote their lies and beg to be lied to some more. But perhaps a larger group is made up of caring, intelligent people who you’d probably really like if you met socially, in the unlikely event that you were invited to one of their social gatherings.
People like Jane Martinson. She is a Guardian columnist, a professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. On November 9th she wrote this piece for the Guardian: “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in”
Now the resignations of both Davie and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have shown that baying for blood gets results.
The biggest shock is that this saga began just a week ago with the leak of a 19-page “devastating memo” from Michael Prescott, a former political journalist who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster, published in the Telegraph. The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump, making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender.
I admire in a technical sense the way that Professor Martinson uses the word “alleges”. The claims that the BBC’s Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender can be fairly called allegations. Even if one thinks these two allegations are probably true, as I do, whether the behaviour of groups of journalists over a period of years was fair or unfair is not a matter that can be assessed quickly at a distance. Two of the three items in Professor Hutchinson’s list of things that she says the dossier “alleges” truly are allegations, i.e. claims that remain to be proved. The first one is the cuckoo in the nest. Professor Martinson also categorises it as an “allegation” that Panorama misleadingly edited Trump’s speech. If she had wanted to, she could have verified the allegation as fact by watching a twenty-three second video. That particular clip was from news.com.au, but it is widely available. (I suppose we could enter a spiral of distrust and say that maybe that video was faked like the Panorama one, but that would involve admitting the Panorama one was faked, so this option is not available to Professor Martinson.)
Now, Prof. Martinson might complain that it is unfair to focus on that little evasion when later in the article she did go on to say,
None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection.
But if she did so complain about relevant material being downplayed, I wouldn’t have to go to ChatGPT to find a smoothly written defence of the practice. Notice how even in the act of admitting that the Panorama edit was “bad and misleading”, she still puts in a little doubt that it actually happened. She writes, “the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit“. “Appears to” – can we get BBC Verify onto that? It might be that Jane Hutchinson wrote “appears to” here and “alleges” earlier as part of a subtle attempt to cast doubt on politically inconvenient facts that she knew were true but would prefer her readers to doubt. However I think it more likely that it was a mere reflex; an involuntary flinching of the eyes and mind away from the thought that a situation could exist where Trump – Trump! – was the one being lied about and people like her were the liars, and, more embarrassing yet, that she and people like her might be the ones being lied to. And that this might have been going on for years, and she, a Professor of Financial Journalism, had not noticed.
Let us finish this discussion with a short prayer for Guardian journalists and those who love them:
“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”
– Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
We must take over the whole of Birmingham, the whole of the West Midlands, the whole of the UK… we will not be taken for granted, and we will win.
– Iqbal Mohamed MP, Jezbollah Party er, I mean “Your Party”
“BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit”, reports the BBC about itself:
BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit
It comes after the Telegraph published details of a leaked internal BBC memo suggesting Panorama edited two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021
In a statement, Davie says “there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility”
I used the tag “Deleted by the Woke Media” because fifty-four minutes of Trump’s speech on January 6th 2021 were deleted by the Woke BBC, and the trailing ends of the tape spliced together to make it appear as if he had said an inflammatory sentence he never said.
Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.
Kruger’s presentation began with the announcement of Reform’s intention to develop a far more detailed agenda for government than any incoming administration in recent memory, including a range of pre-written legislation to give them a running start to their first term in office. In addition, the party will have candidates lined up for key appointments, bringing in ‘expertise, advice and executive capacity’ from outside Whitehall, to both civil service leadership and ministerial roles. The intention, according to Kruger, is to ensure that a Reform Government is positioned to give a clear list of priorities to civil servants upon entering Downing Street — not the other way around.
– Pimlico Journal newsletter
The Green Party are calling the scarcity of resources into play as an argument against the efficient use of resources.
They’re mad. QED.
– Tim Worstall
The Telegraph has a story – with accompanying videos – that ought to finish several careers at the BBC: “Exclusive: BBC ‘doctored’ Trump speech, internal report reveals”.
What Trump actually said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And 54 minutes later:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
What the spliced-together BBC version made it look like Trump said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And immediately afterwards:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
In case your screen is not showing all the lines through most of the second version, the falsely edited BBC version made it look like Trump said,
“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be 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.”
It seems like only yesterday that I posted this in 2021 :“The background and motive of yesterday’s attacks were unclear”.
And here we are again. It has been hours since the mass stabbing on a train travelling from Doncaster to Kings Cross. There were many witnesses. Two men have been arrested. No other suspects are sought. I find it hard to believe that the background and motive of yesterday’s attacks really do remain unclear to the police, the government, or the press. But they certainly have not been made clear to the public.
The Home Secretary has urged the public to “avoid comment and speculation at this early stage”. There are times when this is good advice. This is not one of them. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is never more true when the vacuum is one of information about a crime that makes millions think, “That could be me”. Did you learn nothing from Southport? The only thing that will dissipate the hurricane of speculation is to replace it with facts. It is not as if your strategy of politically correct evasiveness is working. It hasn’t worked for years.
Update: one of the arrested men was innocent and has been released. The only suspect for this crime has now been named as Anthony Williams, aged 32. This development makes the slowness of the police to release any details worse, not better. Williams is black. Those who were inclined to believe that the authorities were trying to avoid saying that the two suspects were Muslim are not going to say, “Oh, how foolish I was” when it turns out the only suspect is black. Furthermore official tardiness meant that an innocent man was under a cloud for long after it should have been clear that he was innocent. What were they playing at?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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