U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to sue the BBC for an eye-popping $1 billion US has upped the ante in what was already shaping up as an existential crisis for Britain’s public broadcaster.
In a letter to British MPs on Monday and later in a media interview, BBC chair Samir Shah apologized for what he called an “error in judgment” that led to a clip of Trump in a 2024 documentary being edited in a way that distorted what he had said.
The clip on the BBC’s premier documentary program, Panorama, featured Trump addressing supporters before an angry crowd stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
An internal review by an independent BBC ethics adviser that was leaked last week by the Daily Telegraph newspaper said the clip made it sound like Trump explicitly urged supporters to start a riot when in fact the two parts were taken from different points of the same speech.
At the time of its original broadcast, the documentary — which was made by an external production company — attracted limited attention. It was only after the leak in the Telegraph that it became a full-blown crisis for the BBC.
Not content with the mea culpa — and the resignation Sunday of the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and news division CEO Deborah Turness — Trump’s lawyers sent the broadcaster a letter Monday demanding a full apology, retraction of the documentary and compensation. It threatened the nine-figure lawsuit if the corporation didn’t comply.
In a statement immediately following the resignations, Trump referred to the journalists responsible as being “corrupt.”
Trump’s lawsuit follows other legal action he’s either taken or threatened against a string of U.S. news outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and CBS.
The fallout from the leak and the resignations it triggered has ignited a crisis within Britain over the future of the BBC and its values. However, it also raises far-reaching issues of alleged media bias and the potential weaponization of political narratives, including in the war in Gaza.
This side-by-side comparison shows the BBC-edited and original footage from a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Critics accuse the British broadcaster of editing the speech in a way that makes it appear he encouraged the subsequent U.S. Capitol attack.
Other damaging allegations
Des Freedman, a media professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, says it’s not surprising the U.S. president has come in with a big threat.
“Given that the BBC has admitted to re-editing, you’d have been shocked had Trump not used this as a political opportunity to further weaken anyone who might ever stand his comments up to critical scrutiny,” he said.
The Telegraph’s leak of the internal review by adviser Michael Prescott contained other damaging accusations with equally troubling implications for the BBC.
Prescott accused the corporation of “systemic issues” of bias including downplaying anti-transgender voices. Concerning coverage of the war in Gaza, the report said the broadcaster’s Arabic-language news service repeatedly ignored stories dealing with the suffering of Israelis and refused to publish stories critical of Hamas.
Director general Davie’s resignation statement did not address any of Prescott’s specific criticisms. Instead, he wrote that while “overall the BBC is delivering well, there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Likewise, in her remarks outside BBC Broadcasting House as she arrived Monday morning, outgoing news boss Turness refused to discuss any of the specific concerns that led up to her decision to leave.
“I stepped down over the weekend because the buck stops with me,” she told reporters. “But I’d like to make one thing very clear — BBC News is not institutionally biased. That’s why it’s the world’s most trusted news provider.”
Nor are its journalists “corrupt” as Trump has alleged, she said.
That’s also the position of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, according to a Downing Street spokesperson.
‘This is a battle for control of the media space’
The BBC has long faced accusations of political bias from commentators and parliamentarians on the political right, particularly during the 14 years of Conservative governments, which ended when the Labour Party won the 2024 election.
But Trump’s culture battles with the media in the United States have also upped the stakes in Britain, says Freedman.
Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News who resigned following criticism over the British broadcaster’s edit of a speech by Donald Trump, denied on Monday its journalists are ‘corrupt,’ as the U.S. president has said. ‘Mistakes are made, but there’s no institutional bias,’ she said.
“This is a battle for control of the media space, of public debate … and how political events are mediated for the public,” he told CBC News.
For many BBC critics, the issue Monday morning was how the broadcaster intends to fix what they see as an “institutional bias.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, Lord Charles Moore, a former Telegraph editor, said that has been especially overt in the corporation’s coverage of the war in Gaza, where he accused it of pushing pro-Hamas narratives.
“Here is an absolutely massive problem — a problem never addressed and a problem never admitted,” said Moore.
The BBC has admitted to several errors in its coverage of the war, but it says it has strived to cover it impartially. It was also sanctioned by the U.K. broadcasting regulator over a documentary about a teen who survived Israel’s bombing that didn’t disclose he was the son of a Hamas official. Davie has previously apologized for how the file was handled.
Meanwhile, the broadcaster has also been repeatedly accused of caving to pro-Israel critics by many on the political left, including the Centre for Media Monitoring, a British group that says it aims for “responsible reporting” of Muslims and Islam.
In a report released in June, the group found that over the first day of the war in Gaza, the BBC gave Israeli casualties 33 times more coverage than those of Palestinians on TV and Radio platforms. It also chronicled multiple instances where it claimed the broadcaster used more “emotive” language to describe Israelis than Palestinians — “Israelis are ‘butchered,’ Palestinians simply ‘die,'” the report said.
A rare editorial statement
In an unusual editorial statement, Radio 4 presenter Nick Robinson, one of the corporation’s most prominent journalists, appeared to suggest the accusations of bias against the BBC are being driven by certain members of the board that oversees the BBC’s programming.
Robinson specifically cited Sir Robbie Gibb, who he says is a former BBC executive who held senior positions in former Conservative governments and helped set up the right-leaning media outlet GB News. Gibb has not directly responded to the allegation.
Robinson also noted that at the time in October 2024 when the BBC aired the Panorama report featuring the controversial edited clip, “there were no complaints received about the editing of Donald Trump’s speech.”
Among those appearing to delight in the BBC’s troubles Monday was Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a right-wing populist who has repeatedly criticized what he’s called the BBC’s “woke ideology.”
“The BBC has been institutionally biased for decades,” Farage said at a London news conference.
And yet, while his party is one of the the broadcaster’s biggest detractors, it has also arguably been one of the greatest beneficiaries of its political coverage.
BBC advocates have repeatedly accused the soon-to-be-departing director general Davie of trying to ingratiate himself with Farage by providing his party with excessive media coverage, including featuring it in prominent news bulletins more than political rivals.
“The director general has gone out of his way to mollify right-wing voices,” said Freedman, the professor.
“I don’t know if you call that an irony, or his just being fed to the sharks that fed himself for so long.”
