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On the day that the government launched a high-stakes consultation to consider fresh ways of funding the BBC in the digital era, the corporation could have done without another difficult news event of its own. Donald Trump’s decision to follow through on threats to sue over the content of a Panorama programme broadcast in October 2024 may not have come as a surprise, given Mr Trump’s litigious record in the United States. But it will add to the general air of beleaguerment at the corporation and further embolden its domestic political enemies.
A terse BBC statement on Tuesday suggested that there would be no backing down in the face of White House bullying. That is the right response to absurd claims of “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” caused to the US president, and a fantastical request for damages amounting to $10bn. The BBC has rightly apologised for the misleading splicing together of separate clips from Mr Trump’s rabble-rousing speech on January 6 2021, prior to the violent storming of the US Capitol. A serious error of judgment was made in that editing process – though the House of Representatives January 6 committee concluded that Trump did use his speech to incite an insurrection. But the claim that a programme not broadcast in the US was part of a malicious plan to defame Mr Trump and subvert the democratic process ahead of last year’s election is utterly specious.
The BBC is only the latest major media institution to be targeted by Mr Trump in a strategic campaign of intimidation, although the first beyond US borders. There are already presidential lawsuits pending in relation to the New York Times (allegedly “a mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democratic Party”) and the Wall Street Journal, which experts say Mr Trump has next to no chance of winning. Legal action and regulatory threats have also led to settlements in the television industry, successfully instilling a climate of fear and self-censorship.
That is the point, of course. Money is not the primary object of the exercise, though cash extracted from a case involving CBS News has reportedly been diverted towards the construction of Mr Trump’s presidential library. The main goal is a cowed mediascape allowing the US president, and online outriders such as Elon Musk, to manipulate and control debate. For US corporate empires whose ambitions partly depend on the goodwill of the Trump administration, the harassment can lead to invidious choices. But as an independent British broadcaster with its own global reputation to defend, the BBC is free to fight back.
In that battle, the corporation deserves more wholehearted backing from the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, than has hitherto been the case. The BBC remains a core component of the UK’s democratic infrastructure, but Mr Trump’s lawsuit is designed to undermine its prestige and sap its confidence, playing into the hands of his fellow travellers on the British radical right. The government should see that strategy for the attempted infringement on national sovereignty that it is. By relentlessly targeting the US “legacy” media and now the BBC, while cosplaying the role of victim, Mr Trump is seeking to galvanise his base and narrow the parameters of acceptable scrutiny and judgment. Auntie is not a menace to the functioning of democracy. But he is.
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