Broadcasting As Weapon of War
15:31 12.11.2025 (Updated: 15:31 18.11.2025)
© Getty Images / Richard Baker
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No, that British Broadcasting Corporation scandal is not just about Donald Trump, it’s about Russia, too. That was a unanimous reaction of next to everyone in Moscow to the news from London.
To remind, and to quote (accurately) The Guardian, the editing of Donald Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 has embroiled the BBC in controversy, led to the resignations of its top leaders and given fuel to claims of media bias at the storied British broadcaster.
As a public sector organization, goes on The Guardian, the BBC is required to be impartial, though it often faces claims of bias, particularly from the right. But in a broadcast of the news show Panorama before the 2024 election (in the US), Trump’s speech was edited to put together two sentences that were actually 54 minutes apart, making it appear as though he was telling people they would walk to the US Capitol and “fight like hell”.
That’s the end of quote. And that’s the start of a long discussion about principles and princes, according to the line of Russian poet Boris Pasternak, written long ago.
The thing is, BBC has quite a record of creating and spreading fake news to promote some of its high ideas, and nobody knows it better than us, Russians. That corporation is blacker than ink, says the charming lady Mary Zakharova, Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson.
She reminds us about BBC’s coverage of Russian sports fans’ behavior at the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014, or of the ridiculous case of poisoning of the Skripal’s family in London later on, but first and foremost comes the infamous affair in Bucha, Ukraine, in March 2022.
Now, that was quite a fake, a crude and dumb one, and BBC’s bias have been very noticeable. Bucha was among the territories abandoned by the Russian Army after the peace agreement signed with Ukraine in Istanbul (later on sabotaged by Europe). And, suddenly, on the fourth day after Ukrainians came back to town, long lines of dead bodies of local civilians have been filmed along the roads of Bucha.
The fact that these people were dead was about the only genuine part of the story. First, there was fresh blood filmed by the crews rushed to the scene, and how it could be fresh four days after the Russians have left? Second, The Guardian has published the autopsy results, one month later, showing that the people of Bucha have been mostly killed by splinters of Ukrainian shells, long after Russians were gone. So, that was a fake.
But nobody in BBC (or anywhere else) resigned, or apologized, or published a correction. The nation is almost at war with Russia, is it not? Then somebody has to show that Russia is bad, or else people will start asking questions about the real reasons for that hybrid war.
And here we are talking not only about one broadcasting corporation, by far. Fake news factory works at full speed in the US, Germany and a lot of other countries. Why so?
Note that though the same, twice mentioned, British newspaper thinks that BBC is seriously wrong, cooking the speech of the American President, you have to look at how the same publication tries to say that the general political aim of that cooking was right, after all.
True, it says, here we have a case of several instances of purported bias in the outlet’s coverage. But, but, but…the speech was edited – but did Trump actually incite a riot? How did his followers interpret Trump’s actions related to the event? How does it fit into his rewriting of the 2020 election? How does this fit into his campaigns against the media in the US?
All in all, that means that faking news is bad, but when that harms the bad Orange Man or especially the Russians, then you can make some allowances for that. First come the principles, then everything else may follow, if we are lucky, of course.
Or how about a fresh case https://www.rt.com/news/627087-dmitriev-washington-post-lawsuit/ of quoting Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s special negotiator on Ukraine and other related matters, after yet another his visit to the US these days. The Washington Post is reporting to us Dmitriev’s undiplomatic words “Vladimir Puttin outplayed everybody again”. But that formerly venerable newspaper had to apologize hastily, since Dmitriev only quoted some American source on that.
Let’s make it personal, since personal it is, for me at the very least. Last time I’ve been calling myself a media man was like a quarter of a century ago, since being a journalist today is a bit iffy. (Writing opinion columns is still honorable, it seems). Media’s reputation in general have been tainted not only in Britain. So it’s only logical to get back to basics, namely, to the original purpose of mass media, as it have been launched at least in Europe way back in the 18thcentury.
The idea was simple: local and national governments needed to publish reports about their activity, so as to avoid stupid rumors. Then other facts, the one that responsible citizens needed to know, were been added to official bulletins.
And only much later it dawned on some people that a newspaper may also be private. But, in any case, it was supposed to publish the true facts and, hence, to enlighten the reading public. That was media’s original purpose and responsibility, and a private publisher had the same responsibility as the government, and deserved the same respect, too.
Then along came the idea that mass media is something like a self-proclaimed Fourth Estate, a watchdog for certain principles that are supposed to contain the princes. That estate, today, has grown into a huge web of folks with all kind of principles, calling themselves bloggers or anything imaginable. Their own, and very different, principles are all they respect, more or less.
I have been working, in my career, in three governmental (or public) media outlets and one private newspaper. That experience of mine shows that decency is basic for media work in all cases, though a relatively official status hugely helps being decent. But the BBC case shows that being public does not save you from ruining the general reputation of mass media, if there is still some of it left.
In any case, the idea of that media’s purpose has made a full circle, and one should not be surprised to see a restored government monopoly on truth. Only thing, a government has to take very good care of its reputation, and refrain from spreading fake news and cooking speeches.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
