4
NEITHER Donald Trump nor any of his associates expressed any righteous indignation over an episode of BBC TV’s Panorama when it was broadcast more than a year ago. After all, it wasn’t aired in the US.
Now that it has been brought to his attention, the American president has threatened to sue Britain’s public broadcaster for $1bn (perhaps even $5bn) for its editorial audacity in stitching together two tiny segments of his warm-up speech to the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. The words “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol” were separated by more than 50 minutes from the advice: “And we fight. We fight like hell.” By splicing together the 12-second segment, the BBC show is accused of suggesting that Trump explicitly invited the violence that followed.
Frankly, no one who listened to the entire speech or observed Trump’s subsequent actions could have come to a different conclusion. Shortly afterwards, the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time on that very basis. The BBC’s editing could have been more judicious, but it hardly qualifies as a billion-dollar error — or a substantial reason for heads to roll.
Hitherto, Trump has only tried suing US media entities (as part of a broad vendetta that stretches from individuals to universities), for facetious reasons, and corporations such as Paramount and Disney have caved in by donating millions to the future presidential library foundation. Reparations have also been extracted from Meta and YouTube. His $15bn suit against The New York Times for critical coverage has gone nowhere, much like his bid to sue The Wall Street Journal for revealing Trump’s salacious 50th birthday message to the paedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The broadcaster is defensible, unlike Trump.
Any defamation case against the BBC filed in Florida (as Trump has indicated) is unlikely to bear fruit, given everything he has said about the events of Jan 6. Trump himself, mind you, is a media owner whose personal Truth Social feed is a relentless stream of pernicious blather (some of it potentially defamatory) alternating with self-aggrandising re-posts.
At the same time, it’s hard to empathise with the BBC, whose claims to independence and impartiality have often been suspect. The silly argument that the broadcaster must be doing something right if it regularly comes under attack from both the left and the far right continues to be occasionally regurgitated. But it can be said that since its inception more than 100 years ago, it has often been seen to be aligned with the British establishment.
Sure, it has every now and then incurred government wrath and faced takeover threats. Such instances mostly flowed from disputes within the ruling elite, rather than reflecting a nod towards popular discontent. For instance, robust reporting on the ‘dodgy dossier’ used to justify Britain’s participation in the 2003 military assault on Iraq followed secret briefings that indicated scepticism among the intelligence agencies about Baghdad posing an imminent threat. The Suez and Falklands wars also stirred a degree of BBC dissent (and a predictable backlash) for similar reasons.
The BBC’s global recognition testifies to its diminishing but still significant role as a conduit for Britain’s soft power. But no one can seriously deny that it has, over the decades, served as a home for many worthy journalists, and still does. Domestically, news operations are only one part of the media behemoth, and it has so far survived the challenges posed by new technologies and changing patterns of news consumption — plus a series of sex and paedophilia scandals.
Its biggest current challenge comes from culture warriors such as board member Robbie Gibbs — a “proper Thatcherite conservative” (by his own description), former Tory spin doctor and linked to GB News, who in 2020 rescued the Jewish Chronicle with undeclared resources — and others who wish to turn it another far-right outfit, or destroy it.
Political appointments to its executive cadre are the bane of the BBC, and its licence fee and charter. Among its various other missteps and follies, it has failed to adequately push back against charges of being unfair towards Israel, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary in the face of a genocide that echoes its hostility towards anti-fascist opinions in the run-up to World War II. Its pointless efforts to strike a ‘balance’ are reflected in the airtime offered to Nigel Farage and climate change denialists. Beyond its multifarious inadequacies in the news and current affairs sphere, there is much to cherish among its cultural output.
It remains to be seen whether the BBC can be rehabilitated as a relatively reliable source of news and views, but at least that is a possibility, however remote. Who could honestly make the same claim about King Con’s White House enterprise?
Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2025
