The Media Lies

The BBC is being investigated by the broadcast regulator in the US over its “misleading and deceptive conduct” in editing a Donald Trump speech.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote to executives at the BBC and to two American broadcasters on Wednesday to find out whether the report was aired in the US.

He spells out how the Panorama programme spliced together parts of a speech that were separated by 54 minutes.

US President Donald Trump has said he will take legal action against the BBC over how his speech was edited by Panorama, after the corporation apologised but refused to compensate him.

Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday evening, Trump said: “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1bn [£759m] and $5bn, probably sometime next week.”

Donald Trump has said he feels he has “an obligation” to sue the BBC over its editing of one of his speeches, as a deadline looms for the corporation to respond to his billion-dollar legal threat.

The US president accused the broadcaster of having “defrauded the public” with an edition of Panorama last year that spliced together two parts of a speech he made on 6 January 2021 and has given it until Friday to respond.

It is seen as one of the main factors in the shock resignation on Sunday of Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News.

It always hurts when a Tim gets disgraced, but if the scalp fits the hat, wear it. Tim Davie had to resign as Director General of the BBC, as did CEO of News Deborah Turness, because the litany of errors on their watch was so great as to indicate a cultural rot from the head down. That rot has put the very future of the corporation in doubt. The BBC’s whole business model was to stake its survival on being a paragon of honesty. If it is caught lying – this brazenly, this often – consumers will revolt.

The Corporation was already in the soup for protecting vast egos accused of very different things – Gregg Wallace, Gary Lineker, Huw Edwards – and for offering a platform for anti-Semitism, but the dossier of biases that recently fell into the Telegraph’s lap took things up a notch.

Donald Trump has threatened legal action against the BBC and welcomed the resignations of two of its most senior figures after a campaign against the broadcaster that reached fever pitch over criticism that its flagship documentary programme in 2024 used a misleading edit of a Trump speech.

Lawyers for the US president said that the BBC must retract the Panorama documentary by Friday or face a lawsuit for “no less” than $1bn (£760m), according to US media outlets who cited the letter. The BBC has confirmed it had received a letter and said it will respond in due course.

The Beeb’s wilful distortion of Trump’s comments on 6 January 2021 was a whole new low for modern journalism.

The BBC loves to pose as a warrior against ‘fake news’. Yet it now stands accused of pushing an entirely fake account of President Trump’s behaviour on 6 January 2021. That’s the day the Capitol building in Washington, DC was stormed by a rag-tag army of angry right-wingers convinced the election had been stolen from Trump. And last year the BBC showed footage of Trump telling the mob he would march with them to the Capitol and ‘fight like hell’. Only that never happened. The BBC made it up. It doctored the footage. This is beyond serious. These are Pravda levels of manipulation.