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Donald Trump’s attacks on the media went global this week. He has threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion over a documentary that his lawyers claimed was a “false, defamatory, malicious, derogatory and inflammatory” edit of a speech the US president gave before the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The threat could plunge the BBC into financial abyss, deepening the worst crisis for Britain’s public broadcaster in recent years and raising questions about its future in a polarized media and political climate.
Here’s what you need to know:
What is a scandal?
In October 2024, days before the US presidential election, the BBC aired a documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?”
At the time, the film received positive reviews in the UK – The Guardian praised it for taking Trump and the MAGA phenomenon seriously – but it received little attention in the US.
And it might have stayed that way had it not been for the now-infamous memo leak. The memo revealed, among a number of other complaints about the BBC’s production, how the documentary spliced together comments made nearly an hour apart during President Trump’s infamous January 6 speech in small sections.
“We’ll walk to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you, and we’ll fight. We’ll fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore,” Trump was shown saying.
In fact, President Trump said, “We’re going to walk to the Capitol and cheer on our brave senators, congressmen and women.” After 54 minutes, he told his supporters to “fight like hell”.
In a letter to a parliamentary committee on Monday, BBC chairman Sameer Shah apologized for an “error in judgment” in how he edited President Trump’s speech, admitting it “gave the impression that he was directly calling for violence”.
How did the scandal start?
Last week, a leaked memo from Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the Broadcasting Editorial Standards Board, to the BBC’s board of directors was published in The Telegraph, a British newspaper with a right-wing editorial bent that has long been hostile to the BBC.
In a memo compiled this summer, Mr Prescott listed a long list of alleged shortcomings in the BBC’s news output, from alleged anti-Israel bias in Arabic-language broadcasts to an overly progressive bias in reporting on transgender people and their rights.
He also criticized the editing of Trump’s speech in the film, which was broadcast as part of the BBC’s long-running documentary series Panorama, saying it was “totally misleading”. “If BBC journalists are allowed to edit videos to try to get people to ‘say’ things they didn’t actually say, what value are the BBC guidelines, why should the BBC be trusted and where does this issue end?” he wrote.
Former BBC journalists have criticized the broadcaster for failing to address concerns about the documentary raised by Mr Prescott and others at a meeting of the BBC’s Editorial Standards Board in January.
“They knew about this for 10 months before the newspaper published Mr Prescott’s report,” Mark Urban, who until last year was foreign affairs editor for BBC Two’s Newsnight, wrote on his Substack. “This is a grave mistake. Why wasn’t this addressed sooner?”
Even when the Telegraph article broke, the BBC was slow to respond. BBC media editor Katie Lazar reported on Sunday that a statement about the documentary had been “prepared for many days”. Instead, the BBC board decided to apologize in Mr Shah’s letter to a parliamentary committee on Monday. That hesitation seems to be causing damage. Just hours after Shah’s letter was published, the BBC reported that Trump was threatening to sue.
yes. BBC director-general Tim Davie and BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday as the firestorm over issues of bias and bias raised in Prescott’s memo intensified.
In a statement, Davey acknowledged that “some mistakes were made” and for which he had to take “ultimate responsibility”, but did not mention the documentary “Panorama”. In an address to BBC staff on Monday, Mr Davie suggested his decision was as much about the cumulative pressures of his five years in the top job as his handling of the Prescott memo itself.
Mr Turness, head of news, said the controversy surrounding the film had “reached a stage where it was damaging to the BBC”.
“I am not responsible,” she said in her resignation statement.
Despite admitting his mistake, Turness pushed back against claims of intentional bias. “I want to be absolutely clear that recent claims that BBC News is institutionally biased are false,” she said.
Although the station is publicly funded, it is not state-owned. The Royal Charter, which established the BBC as a public company in 1927, guarantees editorial freedom and independence from government.
The funds are covered by “license fees.” This is an annual charge of £174.50 ($299) for households to watch live TV, record programs or use the broadcaster’s streaming service, BBC iPlayer. Not paying the fee is a crime.
The BBC’s mission, since its founding, has been to “act in the public interest” and to provide “unbiased, high-quality and distinctive work” to “inform, educate and entertain” audiences.
In a deeper sense, the BBC acts as a kind of national glue, alongside institutions like the monarchy, which are supposed to transcend politics and provide a common reference point for the nation as a whole.
Nominally so. The license fee is supposed to free the BBC from the commercial constraints faced by other broadcasters, prompting many to tailor their broadcasts to suit the political persuasion of their audiences.
But maintaining an attitude of fairness has become difficult. In recent years, the BBC has faced allegations of bias from both the left and the right, with a polarized political climate and a fragmented media ecosystem making it increasingly difficult to achieve its mythical ambition to be a singular, non-partisan voice across television and radio across the country.
The BBC has long been criticized by commercial media rivals who are unhappy about its protected position with public funding. And it is mainly from right-wing politicians who oppose compulsory license fees and believe that the BBC, like its competitors, should compete for audiences on a free market.
Nigel Farage, leader of the new anti-immigration party Reform UK, said on Monday that “the BBC has been institutionally biased for decades” and called for a “very slimmed-down BBC”.
Mr Farage said he spoke to President Trump last week about the Panorama report. “He said to me, ‘Is this how you treat your best ally?’
Trump’s lawyers said in a letter to the BBC that the broadcaster “intentionally and deceptively” edited the film “Panorama” to defame the president in an attempt to interfere in the presidential election. Trump’s team did not point out the error at the time, but lawyers said it caused “overwhelming financial and reputational damage” to the then-candidate.
President Trump has called on the BBC to retract the documentary, apologize and “appropriately compensate” for the harm caused. The BBC has until 5pm ET on Friday to respond.
If these demands are not met, the letter says, “President Trump will have no choice but to exercise his legal and equitable rights, which are expressly reserved and not waived, including suing for damages in excess of one billion dollars ($1 billion).”
Probably not. The BBC collected income of £5.9bn ($7.8bn) in the last financial year, the majority of which came from license fee payments (£3.8bn), with the remainder coming from commercial activities.
It ended the year with 477 million pounds ($627 million) in cash, just over half of what Mr. Trump had threatened to sue for.
Any payment to Mr Trump, even if it was significantly lower than his extravagant demands, would further increase the financial pressures facing the BBC. The Royal Charter expires in 2027, so executives may have been optimistic that Keir Starmer’s BBC-friendly Labor government would be happy to renew it for another 10 years. In the wake of the recent crisis, the government may be wary of asking Britons to continue paying for a service that many find distasteful in an age of cheaper streaming alternatives.
In the United Kingdom and many states in the United States, a defamation action must be brought within 12 months of the alleged defamation. In Florida, victims have 24 months to file charges.
Still, Mark Stevens, a British media lawyer at the London law firm Howard Kennedy, said filing a lawsuit in Florida would complicate Trump’s case.
“The important question is: Will it damage your reputation?” Stevens told CNN. “He’s going to have to show that someone in Florida saw this ‘panorama’ and felt bad about him. … Did that make him less popular with right-thinking people?”
Yes, I repeat. Last year, ABC agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit with Trump against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, also agreed in July to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by President Trump over his “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris last fall. As with the BBC, Trump’s complaint was with the editing of the program. He claimed that Harris’ interactions were intentionally edited to benefit her and hurt him.
Analysts said Paramount would likely agree to settle the lawsuit in order to complete its lucrative merger with Skydance Media, which the Trump administration formally approved in July.
Lawyer Stevens said it may be difficult to get the BBC to agree to a settlement because Trump “doesn’t have the same influence over the broadcaster” that he had with Paramount.
