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The president’s media shakedown tour has gone international.
After successfully extorting cash from CBS, ABC, X, Meta, and Google, Trump is now threatening to kneecap the BBC for “tortious” editing of his incendiary January 6 speech. In Trump’s mind, Britain’s public broadcaster must grovel before America’s vengeful king, or else find itself tied down in a US court and conscripted as a punching bag in America’s endless culture wars.
The dilemma is stark for a media outlet that was already embroiled in Britain’s own culture war and scarcely needed the distraction.
Own goal
On the eve of last year’s US election, BBC’s documentary news program Panorama aired a special called “Trump: A Second Chance?”
The show included a brief clip of President Trump’s speech on the Ellipse four years earlier. Editors spliced together Trump saying “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women” and later footage of him saying “fight like hell.” The effect was to imply that he said “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.”
Perhaps this gave Panorama’s viewers the impression that Trump had urged his followers to walk to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Of course, thousands of his supporters understood him to be saying exactly that, since that’s what they did. But there’s no disputing that the BBC inappropriately elided roughly 50 minutes of Trump’s speech.
This violation of journalistic ethics came back to bite “the Beeb” on the bottom bigly. But in the moment, no one particularly noticed. Trump won the election and spent the last ten months using his position to attack enemies closer to home: Jim Comey. Jimmy Kimmel. The Des Moines Register. Chicago. The First Amendment. Etc.
But then the England’s own culture war brought the issue to the fore in a memo by former BBC adviser Michael Prescott that was leaked to the Telegraph on November 3. Prescott, an ex-journalist who now works in PR, excoriated the network for being insufficiently pro-Israel and anti-immigrant. He decried stories “celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity” and “ill-researched material that suggested issues of racism when there were none.”
In short, it was the usual list of conservative ref-working, bleated out by every self-described sensible centrist claiming that you have to burn down the media village to save it. Naturally, Prescott included the obligatory complaint that the BBC is too mean to Trump — and that’s where the Panorama footage came in.
The BBC, which is subsidized by mandatory license fees collected from every home viewer, is a perennial political football. Conservatives regularly complain that its coverage is biased and demand an end to taxpayer support, and they immediately pounced on Prescott’s memo.
Former prime minister Liz Truss, who tacked hard right after her brief and disastrous term leading the country, demanded an end to the BBC, along with several other pillars of civil society.
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Truss’s successor as leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, was marginally more circumspect.
“A lot of women out there believe that the BBC is institutionally biased against them,” she said, adding that “It’s not about just the high-profile names. It is about everyday people who watch the BBC and know that what they’re watching is not true.”
The fallout is still ongoing, with BBC’s head of news Deborah Turness and director general Tim Davie submitting their resignations on Sunday. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy defended the broadcaster Tuesday in the House of Commons.
But on the other side of the pond, one of those “high-profile names” was pretty sure that it really wa