It said the White House had conflated that incident with a “completely separate” report by BBC Verify, the corporation’s factchecking team, which found a viral video posted on social media was not linked to the aid distribution centre it claimed to show. “This video did not run on BBC news channels and had not informed our reporting,” it said. “Conflating these two stories is simply misleading.”

BBC is misunderstanding this. They didn’t conflate the two separate things intentionally.

I fully believe they did it out of sheer incompetence and ignorance, and when they realised the mistake, they did what they always do and doubled down on it. The dimwits who elect them will get confused otherwise.