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The author of the leaked ‘BBC bias’ memo, seized on by President Donald Trump to threaten a billion-dollar lawsuit against the broadcaster, is a right-wing lobbyist whose firm is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by US tech and media giants with close ties to Trump, to whom they have donated millions.
One of them, Oracle, is owned by a Republican Party mega-donor who in November 2020 spoke with Trump aides about delegitimising the US elections – and who is actively seeking to reshape the US media landscape to benefit the President.
The lobbyist, Michael Prescott, was reportedly appointed to the BBC advisory position under the influence of BBC Board member Sir Robbie Gibb, a co-founder and early fundraiser of the pro-Trump TV news station GB News co-owned by hedge fund multimillionaire Paul Marshall. Earlier this year, Marshall called for the BBC to be dismantled.
The revelations raise questions about whether a network of Trump-aligned interests helped engineer the BBC’s worst governance crisis in a decade.
Crisis or Coup?
When President Donald Trump threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars over its recent Panorama documentary, he accused the corporation of “malicious defamation” for editing parts of his address on 6 January 2021, the day his supporters stormed the US Capitol.
The row was triggered by The Telegraph’s publication of a 39-page leaked ‘memo’, alleging that the Panorama edit exemplified “progressive bias” across the BBC’s output.
Under intensifying political pressure, BBC chair Samir Shah apologised for what he called an “error of judgment,” shortly after director-general Tim Davie and BBC News chief Deborah Turness resigned in the ensuing crisis.
But the man behind the memo is far from a neutral auditor. Michael Prescott is a right-wing lobbyist working as a managing director for nearly a decade at Hanover Communications, a firm with longstanding Conservative Party ties.
Byline Times can reveal that Hanover Communications has been paid at least half a million dollars by four American media and technology corporations whose founders and executives are closely tied to Donald Trump.
According to official EU and UK lobbying disclosures seen by Byline Times, Prescott’s firm represents Oracle, Apple, Meta and Paramount – a roster that spans the core of Big Tech, US entertainment and news media. The latest filings show payments in the six-figure range for the last financial year, covering both regulatory lobbying in Brussels and political communications in Westminster.
The new evidence suggests that Prescott’s memo lends weight to the concerns of BBC insiders that its use was choreographed as part of a wider attack on the corporation by forces aligned with the US President.
The Pro-Trump Bias of the ‘Neutral’ Sources in the Leaked BBC ‘Prescott Dossier’
Byline Times’ analysis of key sources in the memo about the BBC’s alleged ‘progressive bias’ shows it relied on highly partisan right-wing, Trump-aligned organisations
Oracle and the Emerging Pro-Trump Media Empire
Michael Prescott, author of the BBC memo, has been managing director of Hanover Communications, a major British lobbying firm, since 2017.
Leading the list of American tech giants for which Hanover is lobbying is Oracle, whose billionaire founder Larry Ellison – a major Trump ally and Republican Party megadonor – is spearheading a conservative-leaning US media empire, including being in pole position for the purchase of the US version of TikTok.
On 14 November 2020, the Washington Post reported, Ellison joined a strategy call with Trump aides aimed at overturning the legitimate result of the 2020 US national elections. This was less than a week after Trump experienced stunning defeats in Republican strongholds Arizona and Georgia.
Oracle’s EU filings disclose $115,000-230,000 paid to Hanover Communications International in the last financial year for lobbying on cloud computing, artificial intelligence, data-governance and competition policy – fields where Oracle is vying for multi-billion-euro public-sector contracts and strategic control of government data infrastructure.
Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, has pledged a total of $600 billion in investment in the US under pressure from Trump – securing an exemption on tariffs – and is also on the list of donors to his White House ballroom. The firm, which previously donated $1 million in technology support to Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, is also being represented by Hanover Communications according to EU filings.
In Westminster, the UK Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists confirms Meta Platforms and Paramount Global as current Hanover clients. Both are engaged on broadcast and online-safety legislation, including the Online Safety Act and its implications for content moderation and advertising markets.
These companies operate within Trump’s orbit. Meta donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, while Paramount sits firmly inside Ellison’s media constellation.
Earlier this year, Larry Ellison helped his son David, owner of Skydance Media, acquire Paramount Global, creating Paramount Skydance.
The new conglomerate owns CBS News, where it has shaken things up in line with MAGA priorities, just purchased Bari Weiss’ ‘anti-woke’ Substack outlet The Free Press, and is moving to buy Warner Bros Discovery, the parent of CNN. Viacom (now Paramount) bought Channel 5 on 1 May 2014, and after the 7 Aug 2025 merger with Skydance the parent company’s name became Paramount Skydance.
The BBC’s Attempts to Appease the ‘Right-Wing Coup’ Against It Are Now Seeding Its Own Destruction
By attempting to appease those forces seeking to destroy them, the BBC has helped trigger a crisis that now threatens its very future, argues Adam Bienkov
In short, Ellison is moving rapidly to cement domination of the news, film and television markets, while gaining a foothold in the UK.
Each of these pro-Trump corporations has a direct stake in how technology and media regulation are reported in Britain. Their revenues and reputations depend on public narratives about AI, online safety, platform liability, and media competition – debates led by the BBC and other agenda-setting outlets.
While The Telegraph has presented Mike Prescott as an impartial advisor to the BBC, the role of his firm in lobbying on behalf of pro-Trump media and technology giants actively seeking to control the media landscape is a major conflict of interest.
Boris Johnson’s Boy
Michael Presscott was previously appointed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to help select the next Ofcom chair.
In 2021, during Boris Johnson’s premiership, Prescott was appointed as senior external interviewer on the panel choosing the next Ofcom chair, working alongside senior civil servants and Sue Gray. The process was mired in controversy when the Government’s preferred candidate, former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, withdrew amid questions over his political neutrality – a dispute that exposed Downing Street’s desire to tighten control over media regulation. At the time, the Conservative-led UK Government denied there was any conflict of interest.
Prescott is also a close associate of Sir Robbie Gibb, the former Downing Street communications chief who helped launch GB News and now sits on the BBC Board – a connection that raises questions about how Prescott came to be appointed as a supposedly “independent” adviser.
Prescott’s parallel role inside the BBC came soon afterwards. He was brought in as an external adviser to the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, the internal watchdog overseeing accuracy and impartiality across BBC News. That position gave him direct access to the corporation’s editorial decision-making and ultimately allowed him to produce the memo that has now triggered the biggest governance crisis at the BBC in a decade.
His route to that appointment appears to have been eased by Sir Robbie Gibb. Internal sources have described Gibb as instrumental in securing Prescott’s appointment, with the two men known to be long-standing friends. Now sources say Gibb was the loudest voice on the BBC Board amplifying the criticisms articulated in his friend’s memo, and demanding action.
Together, these facts point to something larger than a disputed edit: the leak of Prescott’s document appears part of a co-ordinated effort to undermine public confidence in the BBC, advancing a long-running campaign to reshape – or even dismantle – the UK’s public-service broadcaster from within.
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Robbie Gibb and the Media Ecosystem
If Michael Prescott’s memo provided the paperwork for the BBC’s latest crisis, Sir Robbie Gibb supplied the infrastructure. The former Downing Street communications chief under Theresa May has long moved between government and broadcasting, a bridge between Conservative politics and Britain’s most powerful newsrooms.
After leaving No. 10 in 2019, Gibb became a de facto co-founder of GB News, helping to raise funds and recruit its launch team before returning to the BBC. That move placed him simultaneously inside the corporation’s governance structure and at the heart of a rival network designed to challenge it – an arrangement that some insiders saw as a clear conflict.
As a result, Gibb’s influence reaches far beyond Portland Place. His early GB News fundraising brought him close to hedge-fund billionaire Paul Marshall, who in addition to the TV news channel owns the Spectator and UnHerd. This year, Marshall has fought to expand GB News into the American market, where the channel cultivated endorsements from Trump-aligned figures in Washington.
Earlier this year in March, Marshall described the BBC as a “giant toad” that should be “broken up or sold,” rhetoric that echoed Trump’s attacks on the US public broadcaster NPR. Describing it as the “propaganda arm of the state, who [sic] are ultimately its paymasters”, he added that “the BBC should be broken up” to separate its “public service elements” like news and documentaries from “entertainment, drama, sport”, adding: “The latter should be privatised and allowed to complete to compete with other entertainment companies.”
In August, GB News officially launched in the US via Truth+, the sister channel to Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social. Its new channel features non-stop praise for Trump and attacks on the UK. Eleven members of Trump’s cabinet attended the launch party, which was headlined by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
Michael Prescott and Hanover Communications did not respond to requests for comment.
Byline Times can confirm that of the four-person BBC panel that interviewed Prescott and made the decision to appoint him as an advisor, three of them had longstanding Conservative Party ties.
In addition to Sir Gibb, the panel included: BBC Board member Sir Nick Serota, appointed Chair of Arts Council England by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2017 after serving as the director of Tate (where he was widely criticised for attempting to increase sponsorship from oil giant and climate denial funder BP); and BBC Chief of Staff Paul Oldfield, who had previously served primarily Conservative-led Governments in particular holding senior director roles at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) under Boris Johnson. The other panellist was Dame Elan Cross Stephens, who had held public sector roles linked to the Welsh Labour Government.
The overwhelmingly pro-Tory make-up of the panel that appointed Michael Prescott, including Sir Gibb, raises further questions about allegations from BBC insiders that the memo and its weaponisation against the BBC were part of a culture war “coup”.
A BBC spokesperson said: “The establishment of the editorial advisor roles was a recommendation from the Serota review of BBC editorial processes, governance, and culture. These roles were advertised externally as part of the BBC’s open and fair competition process, and Michael Prescott was interviewed by a panel of Board members who made the collective decision to appoint him.”
The spokesperson did not clarify whether the BBC interview panel was aware of Prescott’s lobbying affiliations to pro-Trump technology and media giants.
This article was amended on 11 November 2025 to incorporate new information including a comment from the BBC.