âť“WHAT HAPPENED: A BBC board member, Muriel Gray, described President Donald J. Trump as a “howling idiot” in social media posts before her appointment.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Muriel Gray, President Donald J. Trump, BBC board members, and other political figures.
đź“ŤWHEN & WHERE: Posts made prior to Gray’s appointment in January 2022; the BBC has been under scrutiny in recent days over manipulative coverage of President Trump.
💬KEY QUOTE: Muriel Gray described President Trump as “just a howling idiot shouting into the abyss.”
🎯IMPACT: The remarks have drawn further attention to political bias on the BBC board following its handling of a scandal involved a doctored Trump speech.
Muriel Gray, a member of the BBC Board and a former television presenter, is facing scrutiny over a series of social media posts she made about President Donald J. Trump before joining the corporation’s governing body in January 2022. In one message posted after Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, Gray described Trump as “just a howling idiot shouting into the abyss.” Other posts from the same period referred to him as “useless” and included remarks mocking then–First Lady Melania Trump. Gray has not commented publicly since the resurfacing of the messages.
The de facto state broadcaster, funded by a compulsory television license fee, is under intense scrutiny after it emerged that an edited version of Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech, aired in a BBC Panorama programme, stitched together lines from different parts of the address in a way that gave the impression he urged supporters toward violence.
A whistleblower revealed that the clip had been manipulated, sparking a series of reports on BBC bias. Because televsion owners are forced to fund the broadcaster, it is required to be impartial and nonpartisan—although it is widely believed to suffer systemic left-wing bias, with successive governments doing little to rein it in.
The BBC has apologised for the doctored clip, and its India-born chairman, Samir Shah, issued a personal apology to the White House as Trump announced plans to pursue legal action, accusing the corporation of defamation. However, a second doctored Trump clip has since surfaced, intensifying criticism of the broadcaster’s editorial processes.
The fallout has been sweeping. Director General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness have both resigned, acknowledging the serious damage caused by the incident. Left-wing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s government has signalled that political appointments to the board may be reviewed as part of an upcoming charter renewal.
A BBC spokesman said all board members are bound by the organization’s governance rules and emphasised that the corporation is committed to addressing the failures that led to the misleading Panorama broadcast.
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