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On Friday, reporters aboard Air Force One asked President Donald Trump about his intention to sue the BBC. He had been threatening legal action against the UK public broadcaster since a leaked memo pointed out that one of its documentary shows had spliced together clips from a speech Trump gave shortly before the 2021 US Capitol riot. The story, published on November 3 by the right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph, engulfed the BBC in crisis, and prompted the resignations of Tim Davie, BBC director general, and Deborah Turness, head of BBC News. The BBC apologized to Trump for its “error of judgement” and issued a correction to the report, but said it would not pay a settlement. “We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and five billion dollars, probably sometime next week,” Trump said. “It was worse than what CBS did with Kamala.”
Everyone reading this will know that journalists edit things all the time, not just because airing or printing speeches in full is unfeasible but because it would be absurdly tedious—and particularly for Trump, who often says tens of thousands of words a day. Journalism does not tell people simply what happened; it makes a determination on what is meaningful and informs the audience accordingly. In this case, the BBC went too far. Panorama, a BBC investigative documentary show, aired an episode called “Trump: A Second Chance?” in the UK in October last year, in which Trump’s words were edited to make it appear as if he said, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol…and I’ll be there with you, and we fight, we fight like hell,” in a single sentence. In reality, these two phrases were spoken about fifty minutes apart.
The BBC’s error is regrettable not so much for its content—the program’s larger point that Trump was cheering on an antidemocratic riot still holds true—as for how it was ultimately weaponized to call the broadcaster’s legitimacy into question. Some might consider a single incautious edit to be an outlier among thousands of hours of good BBC reporting. But for those seeking to discredit that reporting, the error was confirmation of the worst kind of liberal bias. It was evidence, in the words of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, that the BBC was “one hundred percent fake news” and a “leftist propaganda machine.”
Trump’s comparison of the BBC’s edit and “what CBS did with Kamala” is revealing. His lawsuit against CBS News’s 60 Minutes for what he characterized as deceptive editing of an interview with Kamala Harris in order to help her campaign was widely seen as having no legal merit, yet was eventually settled by Paramount, CBS’s parent company, which agreed to pay Trump sixteen million dollars. This gutless capitulation may have greased the wheels for the Ellisons’ takeover of Paramount. But I see a much more apt parallel in the Trump administration’s assault on public service media. Even before his election, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlined a plan to strip funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Congress achieved that in July, revoking more than 1.1 billion dollars. Similarly, in the UK, conservatives have for years worked to undermine, attack, and ultimately defund the BBC. The outsize attention placed on this editing error significantly advances that agenda.
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