Brendan Carr’s FCC launches probe into BBC’s Trump edit

FCC chair Brendan Carr has reportedly written to the BBC, PBS, and NPR announcing an investigation into whether a controversial BBC documentary with a misleading edit of a Donald Trump speech was ever aired in the US.

Breitbart obtained a copy of the letter, which hasn’t been shared publicly by either Carr or the FCC. It’s addressed to Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS, and Tim Davie, who was the director-general of the BBC until he announced his resignation last week.

In it, Carr asks if the BBC provided “either the video or audio of the spliced speech” to either NPR or PBS, and requests transcripts and video of any possible broadcasts of the program in the US. 

The investigation was sparked by a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary which played footage of Trump’s speech on January 6th, 2021, but edited together two sections almost an hour apart to create what was presented as a single utterance suggesting Trump explicitly called for violence at the Capitol.

“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you,” Trump appeared to say. “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 fact the footage was made up of content from three separate sections of the speech, with the mention of fighting coming 54 minutes later during a segment on “corrupt” elections.

The documentary has caused a furor in the UK. The edit was brought to light this month when The Telegraph publicized a leaked internal BBC memo written by former editorial advisor Michael Prescott, previously political editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. It sparked a national debate about the BBC’s alleged bias, led to resignations from both Davie and former head of news Deborah Turness, and has prompted Trump himself to threaten to sue the broadcaster.

This isn’t Carr’s first time threatening PBS and NPR, but comes after a string of censorial actions from the FCC. In September Carr threatened the broadcast licenses of stations that aired Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, after which Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air. Over the summer his FCC instated an ombudsman at CBS to monitor “bias” as a condition of the Paramount-Skydance merger’s approval, and Carr himself recently reposted Trump’s call to have Seth Meyers fired over jokes directed at the president. Just this week, Trump threatened to have ABC’s broadcast license revoked after a reporter asked him about the Epstein files, suggesting Carr “should look at that.”