Two of the most senior executives in the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) have resigned amid a storm over alleged institutional bias in the corporation’s coverage of both President Donald Trump and the conflict in Gaza.

Director General Tim Davie and BBC News Chief Executive Deborah Turness stepped down following weeks of internal upheaval linked to a leaked memo that accused the broadcaster of: “serious and systemic” failures in editorial impartiality.

The 19-page document was written by Michael Prescott, a former Downing Street communications director and external adviser to the BBC Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. Prescott’s memo alleged that a documentary aired on the BBC’s flagship investigative programme Panorama which focused on Donald Trump’s 6 January speech misrepresented his words by cutting together separate sentences to remove his call for a peaceful protest. It also charged that the BBC’s Arabic service displayed persistent bias in its coverage of the Gaza conflict, including unbalanced framing and the use of sources with undeclared affiliations. After weeks of internal silence, Prescott reportedly emailed the memo directly to every member of the BBC Board, forcing the issue into the open.

The sequence that followed underlined the scale of the crisis. The memo’s leak became public early last week. By Friday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, had called the BBC: “a propaganda machine” and: “100 percent fake news,” remarks that made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

Within 48 hours, Davie and Turness had announced their resignations.

On 7 November, BBC board member and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson posted on X: “This is a total disgrace. The BBC has doctored footage of Trump to make it look as though he incited a riot, when he in fact said no such thing. We have Britain’s national broadcaster using a flagship programme to tell palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally.” His intervention intensified pressure on the BBC leadership and underscored how deeply the controversy had shaken the institution from within.

In his resignation letter to staff, Davie wrote: “Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility.” Turness, in her own resignation note, said: “The ongoing controversy around the Panorama on President Trump has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC, an institution that I love. As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”

While both statements described the exits as voluntary, insiders suggest they were strongly encouraged by the BBC Board once the scope of the allegations and the diplomatic fallout became clear. Prescott, who had raised his concerns internally for weeks, is understood to have escalated the memo to the board only after repeated silence from senior management.

The controversy comes in the wake of the Asserson Report, an independent 199-page study released in September 2024. Written by solicitor Trevor Asserson, it examined whether the BBC met its legal and editorial duties of accuracy and impartiality in its coverage of the Israel–Hamas war between October 2023 and February 2024. The project began after a client of Asserson Law Offices suggested a formal review of possible breaches, with most legal work done voluntarily and research costs covered by a London-based Israeli businessman.

Although the report does not assess the Panorama broadcast at the heart of Prescott’s memo, its findings strongly support the broader claims of systemic bias. It found that the BBC repeatedly cited Gaza’s Health Ministry while failing to identify Hamas as a proscribed terrorist organisation, effectively presenting the group as a legitimate authority.

It documented that 68 Arabic-speaking contributors used by the BBC were Hamas members or open supporters of terrorism, none of whom were identified as such on air. The report also detailed how coverage of the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion relied on unverified Hamas claims, with corrections issued only days later and buried online while a senior editor defended the original reporting. Across BBC Arabic, sympathy toward Palestinians was consistently higher than toward Israelis, even in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October massacre, and the imbalance was most extreme in Arabic headlines.

The BBC’s predicament cuts to the heart of what a public broadcaster is meant to be. Funded by compulsory licence fees from British households, it is entrusted to report truthfully and impartially. The revelations suggest not isolated lapses but a culture that failed to uphold those standards.

The resignations mark the first tangible consequence of what critics see as a broader collapse in editorial integrity across much of the media. The BBC now faces its most critical test, whether it can rebuild public confidence by confronting its bias, reforming its editorial systems, and re-earning its mandate as a truthful national broadcaster.