Tim Davie, Director General of the BBC, announced his resignation from the organisation yesterday. The resignation comes in the wake of the BBC preparing itself to apologise over its coverage of Donald Trump, particularly editing his speech from 6th January 2021 with two segments spliced together from an hour apart. The Guardian report:

The Commons culture, media and sport select committee had set a Monday deadline for the BBC to respond to the claims made by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to its editorial guidelines and standards committee. He left that role in the summer.

Prescott criticised the editing of Trump’s speech in an edition of Panorama, which spliced together clips from an address the US president made on 6 January 2021. The edit suggested Trump told the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”

The words were taken from sections of his speech almost an hour apart. The incident has led to criticism of the BBC by Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, who described the corporation this weekend as “100% fake news” and a “propaganda machine”.

It is a foolish own goal from the BBC. If Donald Trump had, indeed, incited violence in his speech, it should be apparent enough without the need to edit parts together. At a minimum, the BBC have opened themselves up to accusations of bias (which they are receiving), but they cannot escape the fact that they edited clips together to make something appear worse than it really was. If their claims are true, such exagerrated edits ought not to be necessary.

I think there is a lesson here for us in the church. Opportunities to complain about things in the church abound. Issues with others – be they in leadership or the membership – are plethora. People being people, there will inevitably be things with which some will find fault. When these things arise, we need to make sure that our complaints, accusations or what have you are genuinely founded. That isn’t to say we are necessarily right – there are all manner of reasons why we might not be – but it is to say that whatever issue we bring, we need to be careful that we highlight specific examples of things that have actually occurred rather than splicing various episodes together in our mind, adding them together to make a matter worse than it really is.

It is very easy to slip into exaggeration when we have concerns. It is very easy to find fault – whether it is legitimate or not – and in a bid to bolster our complaint, exaggerate and misrepresent matters to make them seem worse than they really are. Sometimes it is an attempt to unfairly bolster our claim, other times it may be to try and help others see things more clearly. Whatever the cause, it cannot be right that we effectively exaggerate and misrepresent in order to make more of an issue than is right or fair. Either our concern is serious enough to warrant some sort of response and it therefore speaks for itself or it isn’t and we are probably making more of it than we ought.

This is serious for a few reasons. At a minimum, just like the BBC now, we may find our own reputation taking a hit when we do this. If we want to be taken seriously at all, we have to ensure the things we raise and the way we raise them are credible and factual, not exaggerated and misrepresented.

But it also causes problems when things are serious issues. Perhaps something is Wrong with really serious matter, but we exaggerate and misrepresent the problem (let’s call it what it is: we lie to make it sound worse). We not only lose credibility, nothing is then done about the actual problem because we were intent on making it seem worse than it was in reality. In our bid to address a genuine issue we are the very cause of stopping anything happening about it at all. It is both a self-own and leaves damaging matters unaddressed all in one fell swoop.