How Donald Trump Blew Up the BBC

The president set out to undermine public broadcasters in the US. Now, with help from British allies, he’s taking his strategy global.

Last week, I wrote about the BBC’s big ambitions for the US market and its confidence that a just-the-facts approach, combined with a global sensibility, would give it a competitive edge in Trump’s America. “We don’t assume an ideological position on the part of our audience,” Kevin Ponniah, the BBC’s Americas regional director, told me. “Our journalists are completely impartial.”

The same day my column ran, The Telegraph published a story that seemed to utterly upend those plans. Based on a leaked internal memo, it alleged that a documentary aired just before the 2024 US presidential election on the BBC program Panorama had “doctored a Donald Trump speech by making him appear to encourage the Capitol Hill riot” of January 6, 2021.