The Plan to Bring Down a Giant
How right-wing forces struck a coordinated blow to the BBC.
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.
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