It was a storm too much for Tim Davie. After a series of accusations of bias, the criticism this week grew too strong even for the man known as "Teflon Tim".
A BBC news program is accused of editing a speech by Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, to make it appear as if the president was urging his supporters to storm the Capitol.
Tim Davie says in a written statement on the BBC's website that "overall the BBC delivers well (material) but some mistakes were made and as the chief executive I have ultimate responsibility."
Heated debate
Donald Trump said in his famous and criticized speech that "we are going down to the Capitol and we are going to pay tribute to our brave senators and members of the House of Representatives."
But in the program that aired last year, the sentence was cut together with words the president uttered 50 minutes later, so that it became:
We're going down to the Capitol... and I'm going with you. And we're going to fight. We're going to fight like hell.
The programme, an episode of the news magazine Panorama, was broadcast last year and produced by an independent company. But the clip only came to light last week, when The Telegraph newspaper reported on internal BBC communications about the programme.
Since then, the debate has heated up. Politicians who have long criticized the BBC were given new opportunities to accuse the company of bias and lack of judgment. Not least, the issue of the license fee came back on the agenda.
Trump likes the defection
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said on Sunday that Davie did the right thing by resigning, but that the BBC has "a catalogue full of serious failures that are even worse" behind it.
"It (the BBC) should not expect the public to continue to pay for the company through a mandatory licence fee if it cannot demonstrate true impartiality," she writes on social media.
The criticism has also been harsh from the US and the Trump camp. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the BBC this week as “100 percent fake news” and “a left-wing propaganda machine”. And on Truth Social, Trump gleefully wrote that “they got caught manipulating my perfect speech”.
58-year-old Tim Davie has worked at the BBC for 20 years and took over as director in 2020. The controversy with the program "Panorama" was far from the first in recent years.
Earlier this year, the BBC found itself in a storm when it failed to acknowledge that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza belonged to a relative of a high-ranking Hamas member.
The company also received criticism this summer for its decision not to broadcast another, Israel-critical, Gaza documentary – which was seen as a sign that the BBC wants to avoid being critical of Israel.
Davie has also had to sort out several presenter crises – from the scandal surrounding news anchor Huw Edwards, who was convicted of purchasing child pornography on the internet, to the storm surrounding football icon Gary Lineker, who was forced to quit after criticism of a post on Instagram.
