Trump v The BBC: who will the British public back?

0:02This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

0:30by Donald Trump, but Panorama had edited two bits of the speech and put them together, for which the BBC has apologised and the Director General and Director of News have now resigned. Today we hear that Trump is suing the BBC for$10 billion. And the question is this, are we watching a political battle or a legal battle? Will the British public back Trump or the BBC? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:02The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. And over the weekend, I contacted a BBC executive and said, it all seems to have calmed down. And then yesterday, Trump announced the lawsuit. And the person I wrote to said, yeah, if you could keep quiet next time, thanks ever so. It hasn't quietened down. And the worst nightmare that the BBC have sort of been planning for has come to pass. A month on from when Donald Trump threatened it, he has gone ahead. with this lawsuit filed in Florida, as you say, Emily, a defamation case for$10 billion that he says has cost him so much financial damage and there has been malice and the BBC lied and misrepresented what he said, etc, etc.

1:47And so I guess our job today is to dig a little bit into what this means legally, whether there is a real case, and then widen out the discussion to work out culturally, politically where we stand as a country, whether we broadly are prepared to back the national broadcaster over the US president. So Trump has filed a$10 billion lawsuit for defamation and for violation of Florida's Unfair Trade Practices Act. He's claiming$5 billion in each case. In other words, if you read through the whole lawsuit, and I've gone through the full 46 pages, what you find is they're trying to make two cases. One is that this very much was available in Florida before the election of 2024.

2:38In other words, Americans in the state of Florida, you know, nominally a swing state, could have been subjected to influence, you know, the BBC's political influence if they'd watched something that was derogatory to Trump and they had seen it and would that have influenced the direction of travel of the election. The BBC's pushed back very hard on this and said obviously not because he went on to win the election in 2024 anyway and there is no particular platform on which you can as an American in Florida watch Panorama. Now the lawsuit has sort of debated this and it said that not only are there sort of franchises One is called Blue Ant distribution platforms where you can see panorama.

3:23But the other is in the very language that the BBC uses. They cite Tim Davy talking about the global corporation, the global reach. In other words, their intention, the BBC's intention was to be global. And they put it in front of people across America so that people could watch the BBC. So park that as one thought. The second question is about defamation. He's already had this apology from the BBC over the editing. And his claim is that it was maliciously done. Panorama have said, yeah, it was a mistake. We took one bit from the beginning of the speech. We spooled forward nearly an hour, more than 50 minutes, and took another bit from the end of the speech.

4:05And we smashed those together as if it was one continuous sentence. And perhaps just to remind you at this point, this is what Trump said originally. We'll play you the original and then we'll play you the panorama edit so you can hear the difference. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell. So you get the full context of what he was saying there and you get the panorama edit. Now, this was broadcast a week before the 2024 election.

4:48And in Trump's words, it was a brazen attempt to interfere with and influence the elections. He's basically calling the BBC an election influencer. And the statute of limitations on defamation in the UK is one year, which obviously has already elapsed November the 5th of this year. But in Florida, importantly, there is a two year limit. Hence why this becomes a very popular, very attractive place to see your lawsuit. And there are a lot of judges in Florida who have been appointed by Donald Trump and one or two of them in very celebrated cases have come out very, very much in favour and taking the Trump legal team's view on some of these cases.

5:29And that's another reason why people think he chose the Florida jurisdiction to bring this defamation case. The BBC's argument has been, look, no one saw it in America. So how can we be guilty of libel? How can we have impaired his election chances? How can we have ruined him financially and cost him reputational damage when one, it wasn't seen and two, he won the election anyway? And it's kind of the legal document that they've drawn up. There've been many occasions on this podcast where we've talked about some of the kind of outrageous things and clumsily written things that Donald Trump has said.

6:00I just want to read you this paragraph from the lawsuit, which says, in addition to access through various means, including BritBox, which is the product that all the British producers have to sell not just BBC documentaries, but things like Downton Abbey, for example, made by ITV, is available in America. And it says, including BritBox, it's well established that millions of Florida citizens use a VPN, a virtual private network, to view content such as the Panorama documentary. So hang on, you're not saying that millions viewed the panorama you're saying that millions could have viewed it because they've got a vpn now i think it's probably negligible if anybody thought oh i must watch the panorama in florida and this is the problem that the bbc now has that donald trump has widened the attack out through this suit that it's not just about the splicing together of those two bits of the speech on january the 6th that panorama showed and the bbc has apologized for and it was stupid it was egregious i mean i've you know i've said all this before on the podcast donald trump widens it out into much greater damage about some of the other people that were speaking in the program ignoring of course all those who were speaking in favor of donald trump and then citing people like liz truss as one of his main arguments and probably worth dwelling on what he says about liz truss in all of this.

7:27Yeah, I mean, he quotes Liz Truss and he says no less an authority than the United Kingdom's former Prime Minister Liz Truss. I think it's probably a long time since she's had anything that heartwarming about her role as PM from anyone this side of the ocean. But he quotes Truss as saying the BBC is a huge problem. They've lied, they've cheated, they've fiddled with footage, especially in the case of President Trump, also covering up what's happening in Britain, whether it's mass migration, whether it's our economic problems, they're always biased towards the left. I mean, so much to unpack here, isn't there?

8:08This idea that Liz Truss is wading to the rescue of a maligned Trump over the national broadcaster after she has repeatedly says she feels that she was brought down by the institutions of Britain, the deep state, the dark state, which we assume includes the BBC. Look, I think where this lawsuit, and as we say, it is long and detailed, and there is a bibliography and dates and all the rest of it, it's meticulously done. But I think for my money, where it gets weaker, where it gets confusing, is the number of incidents that Trump and his team of lawyers are trying to put into this whole idea of defamation.

8:55If you start with a panorama edit and said, we're going to make a case that that was done maliciously, there's no way you could do that by accident. We believe it was done maliciously. You could argue that case, you know, we could probably do it as a fight to the death. And if you wanted to try and find out whether there was malice, yeah, you could embark on a really dirty sort of hunt, trawling through emails, trawling through conversations, trawling through WhatsApps from various producers, trying to find out who did the edit, why, and what was behind it. But then he expands it into the whole Shape of the Panorama documentary.

9:30And what he cites is any commentator who is critical of him. He cites Robert Reich, who is, you know, a well-known Democrat, former Labour secretary. During the Clinton era. During the Clinton years. He cites Heather Cox Richardson, who is a very well-known, hugely admired historian. He cites a Democratic congressman. He cites Rick Wilson, who is, you know, a sort of author on Trump, a sort of self-professed Trump hater. These are commentators who have offered opinions to Panorama on Trump. And as you say, in the whole hour, they sit alongside Trump fans, Trump supporters, Trump voters, because that's what the BBC does.

10:12It gives you one of those and one of those, one of those and one of those. So this idea that by naming these individual contributors, they are defaming him, I think would send chills down anyone who's ever put together a piece or a package or report that said this guy hates him, this guy loves him. Yeah. So in my view, the BBC has a real problem over the editing and the splicing of those two clips together. but there of course is fair comment you know people can say rude things about emily matliss they say rude things about john sople that doesn't make it a libel i know shock horror but if it's something is untrue and demonstrably untrue in the british case that constitutes a libel if you can prove something to be untrue emily matliss goes to the park with her dog and kills other dogs well no you don't and then unless they can prove that then you have got a libel action that's absolutely won against the person who says that.

11:15But if they said I was a complete airhead, what am I going to do about that? Am I going to sue somebody for calling me a complete airhead? I'm not. So one of the people in the documentary calls Trump a cult leader. Is that demonstrably true? Yes, but there is something different about American law and British law, which I think our listeners need to be aware of, that it is that in America, you've got much, much, much more latitude to say what you like. And just because something isn't true, doesn't mean you've committed a libel. You have to have malice, malice of forethought. There has to be malicious intent.

11:48You knew something to be untrue. You deliberately went ahead and published it, even though you knew it to be untrue because you had malice in your heart. And that is why it's a really problematic case for Trump to bring. And a really problematic issue now is what does the BBC do next? Twist or bust? because on the one hand, it says we're going to fight it. They've said that today. They've said that today. They've said we are going to fight this case. But I understand from pretty senior BBC people that are still serving there that they say, well, we've got insurance and we could probably settle out of court.

12:25It may cost us 10 million if that's the worst case scenario. But you're still then in the situation where, one, you've got the reputational damage that you're settling and not fighting. and two, even if you've got an insurance policy, that insurance policy is paid for with licensed payers money or do you go down the other route and fight the case in which case it will probably cost tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to stand up in court in America and do that. And there's just one other bit of this that I think, again, will be focusing the minds of the BBC's legal team and political team is that in America, there is the whole process of discovery where the Trump legal team say, right, I want to see all the WhatsApp messages.

13:11I want to see all the emails between the production staff, between the editorial staff at the top table of the BBC. And you can get an absolute treasure trove. And you're not telling me there won't be emails in there that say disobliging things about Donald Trump that will have vomit emojis or whatever it happens to be, which Donald Trump will be able to use and say, You see, you're still biased. There was one case in America that was settled recently against ABC television where ABC paid Donald Trump up front because they didn't want to go to the disclosure process of, you know, oh, my God, look at what we all said.

13:48I think this is so important and you can't actually say it enough that, I mean, this is getting a lot of airtime. This is a high profile story, clearly. But it's not the first time that the BBC has found itself sued by somebody, sued by a corporation. There are these payments that go out when they get a story wrong, when they malign a company, when something, when they make a bad judgment. Money does change hands. You know, it's happened during the time we were there. We've known the stories where, you know, there was misreporting and money was paid out. But crucially, this is not the first time that Trump has tried to chill the media by slapping them with a lawsuit.

14:30And we have seen a pattern of behaviour. It seems to me really important that you do not forget. This is a pattern of behaviour in Trump's America in his second term. And you can name, as you have done, ABC, you can name CBS. Both had payouts of around£12 million,£15 million. What Trump has done almost systematically is go through many of the major media players, whether it's ABC, whether it's CBS, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, except for the places where they have very openly laid down the red carpet, Bessos at the Washington Post and all the rest of it. He has made a point, it feels like he has made a point of finding things that have given him cause to sue.

15:19And it's never gone to court. I don't think the Wall Street Journal thinks it's in any danger of losing a suit to Trump. But it is time consuming and it is reputation consuming and it is energy sapping and people will lose their jobs along the way. So I think I think to sort of assume that this is Trump deeply upset by one edit at the BBC is to slightly miss the point, which is across the board. He is trying to silence the media. Of course, he's trying to intimidate and he's been very effective in a lot of cases where people have rather than fight him in court, have rolled over. Some are not settling.

16:00I mean, The Wall Street Journal hasn't settled. The New York Times hasn't settled. But just take the ABC example who did settle with Trump and they gave him, you know, 10 million pounds or whatever it is. That is purely between ABC's shareholders. Do we support this? The board? Do we support it? And Trump. And how do you prove malice? Are you saying that the VT editor who sat in the edit suite putting together the clips of Trump from the January the 6th speech had malice in his heart? I mean, I bet it was idiocy. I mean, I bet he thought... What's not the beauty editor, is it? It's the producer who makes the call on the cut.

16:37And where it gets problematic about the malice bit is the BBC had it pointed out to it months and months and months ago that you'd taken out two non-sequential bits of Trump and smashed them together, as you say, and did nothing about it and thinking we can get away with it. Now, is that malice or is that just kind of wanting to hope you can get away with something and a quiet life? I think those are the sort of issues, you know, proving malice, I think, is not easy. Yeah. And I think also you have to take it in the context of the whole piece. And I think one of the curious things that came out of the select committee was, you know, Michael Prescott, whose external report sort of kicked off this whole hornet's nest in the first place, was him saying, actually, I watched the panorama when it went out and I thought it was pretty fair.

17:21You know, no one seems to be saying that anymore, that there can be a terrible mistake in the middle of it or a stupid mistake in the middle of it or even a malicious mistake in the middle of it. But it doesn't materially alter the balance of the documentary as a whole. And is that relevant? I think it probably is. If he settles this case, if the BBC settles this case or fights it and spends tens of millions of dollars, it's not just about your board of directors. it's about the British public and that everyone is a shareholder in the BBC who has a licence fee and so that is why what do licence fee holders feel about 10 million dollars going into Donald Trump's bank account from them I mean that is the question that the BBC now faces so does it go for the line of least resistance which would be to try and settle out of court or does it fight it and spend tens of millions of dollars more and all the ugliness that could go with that.

18:16Yeah, I mean, we want your favourite character, which is the Hugh Grant Prime Minister in Love, actually, saying, to hell with that, we're going to stand and fight for, you know, king and country, and we will not be bullied by a foreign power. But frankly, if it comes to court in any shape or form and they have to start paying big buck lawyers, then you're talking probably 30, 40, 50 million on the court proceedings before you even get to a judgment. So, yeah, I mean, if you want the path of least resistance, you just you pay to make it go away. And Emily, you mentioned my love of Hugh Grant playing that role of the prime minister.

18:53The one thing I do not see Keir Starmer doing right now is getting up and banging his fist on the table and saying, Donald, call this off. I'm telling you right now, we won't put up with it because I don't think that Keir Starmer wants to expend political capital on trying to save the BBC over a dumb edit on Panorama. He doesn't want the BBC to come to any harm. But what leverage has the British government got? I mean, you can ask nicely, but the BBC has got no leverage over America to say you've got to change your mind on this. Well, that is a bigger conversation. And after the break, we're going to be talking about the political, cultural and national dimensions of a fight between the BBC and Trump.

19:37News you can trust and the conversations that matter. With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks. My American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardiff. Discover how today's story affects your life. Listen on our free Global Player app or the new LBC app. LBC. Leading Britain's conversation.

20:06The News Agents. So the question you asked a moment ago was, would Starmer put his neck on the line for the BBC, the Hugh Grant prime minister? And given how much effort he's put into his relationship with Trump, you'd kind of think, no, right? because he's trying to cultivate soft power. He's done the state visit, the visit to Windsor Castle with the king. He's done the trade deal. Admittedly, you know, that's sort of crumbling before our eyes the further on it gets. But would we respect Starmer as a prime minister if he didn't stand up for the national broadcast, if he didn't take on the British institution against, you know, the American bully?

20:52I mean, I do think that is a question. and you're saying he doesn't need to. I'm just saying he's got no leverage. Any cards, I mean, Donald Trump loves the metaphor of what cards have you got in your hand and he does that with Zelensky repeatedly. But what cards has Keir Starmer got left now? He's given him the state visit. Donald Trump said, thank you very much, that was very nice. Got dressed up in white tie and tails and I saw a military band marching up and down at Windsor. That was great, loved it, but we've done that, thank you. What do you, you know, you're not getting anything else in return now.

21:19And I think that it's unlikely that Keir Starmer, when he is beset by so many other problems, which is, you know, maybe something else we could go into another time. And I'm sure we will. That he's not going to go and fight, you know, to the death on behalf of the BBC. And then you've got the question of where does the public stand on the BBC? Because I think that, you know, having been brought up, I mean, having worked my whole career at the BBC and thinking that, you know, I've always had it in my head that everyone hates the BBC until such times as it's under attack and it's an existential crisis.

21:53And then everybody rallies around and says, oh, well, yeah, I don't like the corporation, but I love the programmes and I love watching this and I love watching that. And I love Antiques Roadshow and I love Match of the Day and I, you know, whatever else it happens to be. And I'm not sure that is still true today. And that, I think, is the seismic shift that we've seen over recent years. I don't think the BBC does command that overwhelming support that it once did. And it's part generational, but it's also attitudes as well. I mean, I guess we have to slightly sort out when we talk about the BBC, whether we're talking about just BBC News or we're talking about the BBC and all its sort of entertainment branch as well.

22:35But I went to Luke Trill for More In Common, as I often do at these moments, to just ask him very bluntly, where do we stand as a country now? What does your polling show us about loyalty, frankly, that Britons have or don't have towards the BBC? And he said most Britons, and this is only 53 percent, so just over half, remain trusting of the BBC to provide accurate and impartial news. But as you said, that trust varies by politics, age and education. Forty two percent of Britons think the BBC is biased, but they're split on which way the broadcaster leans. So 27 % thinks that the bias tends to be left wing.

23:1315 % thinks it's biased to the right wing. And only three in 10 Britons, so less than a third, believe the BBC is an impartial institution. Now, what Luke was saying was that overwhelmingly three quarters of Brits think that what happened over the Trump speech was really bad, that the BBC did misrepresent Trump's speech. And they don't like the fact they think it was misleading overall. The same numbers and sort of, you know, around 60 percent think that Tim Davey and Deborah Ternes were right to resign over this. But I mean, I guess the point is, this is all sort of in the ether of a poll. When you actually see Trump standing in front of you and saying, I'm going to take your license fee money, I'm going to sue you.

24:01And let's be honest, if he sued for five billion, which is the sum on the table each time, 10 in all, that would be the end of the BBC. There is no more BBC. So, I mean, to go back to your original point, do people get cross with the BBC? They do. Do people all have their own sense individually of what the BBC is getting wrong all the time? They do. When you work at the BBC, do people tell you what that is the whole time? They do. But do they really want it brought down by a rich foreign billionaire who doesn't need the money, who doesn't need the fame, whose reputation clearly didn't stand or fall on what happened in a panorama that might or might not have been shown in Florida.

24:44Do they really want to see the end of an institution in his hands? I don't think so. The numbers you just gave there, Emily, I thought they were really interesting polling data from More in Common. But the idea that only 53 % of Britons, and I know it's a poll on margins of error and all the rest of it, but if only 53 % of British people think the BBC is fair and impartial, that is a terrible number. I mean, I would love to know what it was 10 years ago when I suspect it would have been way higher. And it's partly a factor of the growth of social media is partly a factor of diversity. But it's also to do with the perceived failings that if you were pro remain.

25:26We've spoken about this before. The way that BBC covered Brexit annoyed huge numbers of people. There are mistakes that are made. But I just know from my time in the BBC, how much effort is gone into to try and get fairness and to try to get impartiality. And they do strive really hard to do it. And yet these numbers and the fury over the panorama and the way it's been handled, irrespective of what happens in the court case, has done the BBC brand grievous damage. OK, so if you want the number 10 years ago, 2015, the number of Britons who trusted the BBC was 58. It's now 53. So it's gone down by five, but not that much.

26:16And that, you could argue, is one of the most sort of seismic periods of political history that this country's seen, the Brexit referendum and the beginning of Trump and all the rest of it. A lot to happen. I mean, one of the things that Luke points out, which I think is worth bearing in mind, is that financial security is a major factor in trust. In other words, if you are less well off and if the BBC as a licence fee is eating into your household, you are less likely to give it the benefit of the doubt because you're constantly saying there's a lot of things I'd like to be spending this money on and I'm not sure that's it.

26:48Whereas if you are well off, if it doesn't really hit you, if it doesn't really disturb you to pay the licence fee, then you're more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt because you don't feel it's taking as much from you, quite frankly. So, I mean, just to your whole question of sort of institutional trust, I think it's not just the BBC and it's not just the UK. We don't trust institutions across the board as much as we do. We were having this conversation about the monarchy a few weeks ago. We're having this institution about individual, we're having this conversation about individual, independent bodies the whole time.

27:28You know, after the blood scandal, do you still trust the NHS? After the post office scandal, do you still trust the post office as an institution? I think we are getting much, much more demanding of all these institutions and feeling quite sceptical of where our trust goes anyway. Yeah, but people are voting with their feet on the licence fee. And hundreds of thousands of fewer people are paying the licence fee saying, I don't want to do it. And you know, you haven't got TV detective vans going round, checking on whether people have got a television aerial on top of their house or not. Who needs an aerial?