Read the complete article from CNN, Why is Trump threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion?

According to the article, Donald Trump’s assault on the media went global recently, as he threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion over a documentary that his lawyer claimed made “false, defamatory, malicious, disparaging, and inflammatory” edits to a speech the U.S. president made before the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“I think I have an obligation to do it … because you can’t allow people to do that,” Trump recently told the media. He said the BBC had “butchered” his “beautiful” and “calming” speech and “made it sound radical.”

The threat could tip the BBC into a financial abyss and has deepened the worst crisis for the British public broadcaster in recent history, raising questions about its future in a polarized media and political landscape.

What is the Scandal About?

In October 2024, days before the U.S. presidential election, the BBC aired a documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?”

At the time, the film gained positive reviews in the U.K. – the Guardian praised it for taking Trump and the MAGA phenomenon seriously – but attracted little attention in the United States.

And that is how it might have remained, had it not been for a now-notorious leaked memo, which – amid a litany of other complaints about BBC output – revealed how in one small section, the documentary had spliced together comments made nearly an hour apart by Trump during his infamous January 6 speech.

“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump was shown to say.

Trump actually said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” Fifty-four minutes later, he then told his supporters to “fight like hell.”

In a recent letter to a parliamentary committee, BBC Chair Samir Shah apologized for what he called an “error of judgment” over how Trump’s speech was edited, which he conceded “did give the impression of a direct call for violent action.”

How Did the Scandal Originate?

Recently, a leaked memo to the BBC board from Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee, was published by The Telegraph – a British newspaper, with a rightwing editorial position, that has long been hostile to the BBC.

In his memo, compiled this summer, Prescott laid out a long list of alleged shortcomings in the BBC’s news output, from alleged anti-Israel bias in its Arabic-language service to an overly progressive slant in its coverage of transgender people and their rights.

He also criticized the “completely misleading” edit of Trump’s speech in the film, which was aired as part of the long-running BBC documentary series “Panorama.” “If BBC journalists are to be allowed to edit video to make people ‘say’ things they never actually said, then what value are the Corporation’s guidelines, why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?” he wrote.

Former BBC journalists have criticized the broadcaster for failing to address concerns about the documentary, which Shah, the chairman, said had been raised by Prescott and others in a meeting of the editorial standards committee in January.

“They knew about the problem for 10 months before the newspapers published Prescott’s report,” Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor for BBC Two’s “Newsnight” program until last year, wrote on his Substack. “It’s a serious mistake, why hadn’t they gripped it sooner?”

Even when The Telegraph’s story broke, the BBC was slow to act. Katie Razzall, the BBC’s media editor, reported Sunday that a statement on the documentary had been “ready to go for days.” Instead, the BBC board decided to apologize in Shah’s letter to the parliamentary committee on Monday. That hesitation appears to have been damaging. Just hours after Shah’s letter was published, the BBC reported Trump’s threat to sue.

Have Heads Rolled?

Yes. The BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, recently resigned amid an escalating firestorm over the issues of partiality and bias raised in the Prescott memo.

In a statement, Davie conceded “there have been some mistakes” for which he had to take “ultimate responsibility,” but stopped short of mentioning the “Panorama” documentary. In an address to BBC staff on Monday, Davie suggested that his decision was as much to do with the cumulative pressure of five years in the top job as the handling of the Prescott memo itself.

Turness, who oversaw the news division, said the controversy around the film had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC.”

“The buck stops with me,” she said in her resignation statement.

What is the BBC? Who Owns It?

Trump has expressed disbelief that “one of our great allies” could treat him so dishonestly. “(The) BBC – the government has a chunk of that one, I guess,” he said in a recent interview.

The British government does not “have a chunk” of the BBC. The broadcaster is publicly funded but not state-owned. A “royal charter,” which established the BBC as a public corporation in 1927, guarantees its editorial freedom and independence from government.

It is funded by a “license fee” – an annual payment of £174.50 ($299) levied on any household that watches live TV, records programs, or uses BBC iPlayer, the broadcaster’s streaming service. It is a criminal offense not to pay the fee.

Since its founding, the BBC’s mission has been to “act in the public interest” and provide “impartial, high-quality and distinctive output” to “inform, educate and entertain” its audiences.

More profoundly, the BBC functions as a sort of national glue, sitting alongside institutions like the monarchy that are supposed to rise above politics and provide a common reference point for the whole country.

Is the BBC Impartial?

Nominally, yes. The license fee is supposed to free the BBC from commercial constraints faced by other outlets, which drive many to tailor their output to the political persuasion of their audiences. The broadcaster says it is committed to “achieving due impartiality” in all its output.

While admitting that, as with every news outlet, mistakes happen, Turness hit back at claims of deliberate bias. “I want to be absolutely clear (that) recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong,” she said in her resignation statement.

But the posture of impartiality has become hard to sustain. In recent years the BBC has faced allegations of bias from both the left and the right, and a polarized political landscape and a fragmented media ecosystem has made it harder to achieve an increasingly mythical ambition to be the singular, non-partisan voice through the nation’s television and radio sets.

The BBC has long been criticized by its commercial media rivals, which begrudge its protected, publicly funded status; and by politicians, mostly from the right, who oppose the compulsory license fee and think the BBC should compete for its audience in the free market just like its competitors.

“The BBC has been institutionally biased for decades,” Nigel Farage, the leader of the upstart anti-immigrant party Reform UK, recently said, calling for “a very much slimmed down BBC.”

Farage said he spoke to Trump about the “Panorama” report last week. “He just said to me, ‘Is this how you treat your best ally?’”

What Has Trump Threatened?

In a letter to the BBC, a lawyer for Trump said the broadcaster defamed the president by “intentionally and deceitfully” editing the “Panorama” film to try to interfere in the presidential election. Although Trump’s team did not call out the error at the time, the lawyer said this caused the then-candidate “overwhelming financial and reputational harm.”

Trump wants the BBC to retract the documentary, issue an apology, and “appropriately compensate” him for the alleged harm caused.

The letter said that if those demands were not met, “President Trump will be left with no alternative but to enforce his legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and are not waived, including by filing legal action for no less than $1,000,000,000 (One Billion Dollars) in damages.”

Could the BBC Afford to Pay $1 Billion in Damages?

Probably not. The BBC collected £5.9 billion ($7.8 billion) in revenue in the last financial year, mostly from license fee payments (£3.8 billion), the rest from commercial pursuits.

It closed the year with cash reserves of £477 million ($627 million) – a little more than half the amount Trump threatened to sue for.

Any payout to Trump – even one that was significantly lower than his extravagant demand – would add to the financial pressures faced by the BBC. With the royal charter expiring in 2027, its management might have been optimistic that the BBC-friendly Labour government of Keir Starmer would happily renew it for another decade. The latest crisis could make the government wary of asking the British public to keep paying for a service many have come to resent in an era of cheaper streaming alternatives.

Why is the Case Being Brought in Florida?

In the UK, and many U.S. states, a defamation case must be launched within 12 months of the alleged libel. In Florida, a victim has 24 months to lodge a complaint.

Still, bringing the case in Florida will complicate Trump’s argument, according to Mark Stephens, a UK media lawyer at Howard Kennedy, a firm in London.

“The key question is: Does it damage your reputation?” Stephens told the media. “He’s going to have to show that somebody in Florida watched this ‘Panorama’ and thought the worse of him. … Did that lower him in the estimation of right-thinking people?”

Has Trump Threatened Media Outlets Before?

Yes, repeatedly. Last year, ABC agreed to pay $15 million in a settlement with Trump in his defamation suit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos.

In July, Paramount – the parent company of CBS News – also agreed to pay $16 million to resolve a lawsuit filed by Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris last fall. As with the BBC, Trump’s grievance was over editing in the program; he claimed the Harris exchange was deliberately edited to benefit her and hurt him.

Analysts said Paramount likely agreed to settle that case to complete a lucrative merger with Skydance Media, which the Trump administration formally approved in July.

Stephens, the lawyer, said that Trump might find it harder to get the BBC to agree to settle, since “he doesn’t have the sort of leverage” over the broadcaster that he did over Paramount.

Discussion Questions

  1. Define defamation.
    Defamation is a false statement made about another person that damages the person’s reputation. There are two types of defamation: (a) slander, which is oral defamation; and (b) libel, which is written defamation.

  2. Based on your review of the information contained in this article, did the BBC “defame” President Trump? Why or why not?
    As indicated in the article, the subject BBC documentary spliced together comments made by Donald Trump nearly an hour apart in his speech prior to the infamous storming of the Capitol by protestors on January 6, 2021.

    As reported by the BBC in its documentary, the statement read:

    “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

    Trump actually said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” Fifty-four minutes later, he then told his supporters to “fight like hell.”

    In your author’s opinion, the BBC did technically misrepresent Trump’s statements; however, one must be mindful of the fact that in a defamation action, the plaintiff must prove by the greater weight of the evidence not only that the statement (as it was represented) was false, but also that the plaintiff suffered damage to their reputation as a result.

    In your author’s opinion, in a court of law, it would be difficult for President Trump to prove that he suffered damage to his reputation as a direct result of the BBC documentary’s misrepresentation.

  3. It is often claimed that in the “national interest,” a sitting president should not be sued, meaning that any litigation against a president should be delayed until they are no longer in office. Should the same be the case if a sitting president has a claim against another party? Explain your response.

    This is an opinion question, so student responses may vary.

    In your author’s opinion, it is reasonable to conclude that if a sitting president cannot be sued during their term in office due to national security concerns (i.e., the president being distracted from attending to the nation’s business), the same can be said of civil actions involving the president as a plaintiff.

    One concern your author has is that if the president can pursue civil actions during their term of office, the president could use the leverage of the office to extract favorable demands, including exorbitant settlement amounts.

    Since President Trump assumed his second term of office in January 2025, he has settled multiple personal lawsuits against corporations. Meta agreed to pay $25 million to resolve a suit about post-January 6, 2021 account suspensions. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, paid approximately $16 million to settle a dispute over a “60 Minutes” edit. Disney, the parent company of ABC, agreed to pay approximately $16 million in a defamation claim over comments made by one of its news hosts, George Stephanopoulos. Finally, Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, agreed to pay $24.6 million to settle Trump’s YouTube suspension lawsuit.

    Note that a civil settlement does not typically constitute an admission of liability. All these lawsuits were settled before they were litigated on their merits. One can wonder whether any of these lawsuits would have settled, and if so, whether the settlement amounts would have been as high, if “citizen” Donald Trump had been the plaintiff, rather than “President” Donald Trump.