Why Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1bn

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, why is Donald Trump threatening to sue the BBC for a billion dollars?

0:21It was only a week ago that The Telegraph ran its first story about anti-Trump bias of the BBC. It's yet another appalling example of BBC bias, this time involving Donald Trump. Our reporter Gordon Rayner will reveal how the BBC doctored the US president's words ahead of the January the 6th riots to make him look like he started it all. It didn't initially seem like a big deal. The Telegraph has a long history of criticising the BBC. And this just seemed like the latest instalment. And yet, as the week went on, the story gathered steam. The BBC, which is funded by you, the public, by tax, presented manipulated footage as a fact to back its own left-wing agenda.

1:07Absolutely shocking. That is fake news. You know, actually putting different things together to try and make something look different from what it actually was. And I do think heads should roll. Till Tim Davy, Director General, comes out and either tries to explain what Panorama was up to or else resigns, I'm afraid, folks, I am going to be in the sad position of finally cancelling my licence fee payment. And I suggest you do the same.

1:40Meanwhile, The Telegraph continued to publish claims from what it described as an internal whistleblowing memo, written by a former member of the BBC's Editorial Standards Committee. It claimed the BBC's transgender coverage was censored by its own reporters, and that the BBC's Arabic service was routinely platforming Jew-hating journalists and giving undue weight to Hamas over Israel. The allegations piled up and caught Donald Trump's ear. Caroline Leavis, the president's press secretary, called the BBC 100 % fake news and said that British taxpayers are being forced to foot the bill for a leftist propaganda machine.

2:19Yet from BBC High Command came... nothing. Silence. Until Sunday night.

2:55enemies of the BBC.

3:00Either way, Trump is now threatening legal action, and the future of the broadcaster is once again being called into question. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. How a 19-page dossier plunged the BBC into crisis again.

3:22Michael Savage, you're The Guardian's media editor. Thank you very much for being here again. Thanks for having me. So I imagine any plans you had of a quiet Sunday evening went out of the window at about six o 'clock when news of the resignations of the BBC chair and head of news went public. Were you surprised that they both resigned? I was surprised, but I think more importantly, people at the BBC were surprised. I think even the BBC board was surprised. And actually, some of the sense I was getting during that Sunday from both BBC people and government was actually maybe the BBC could apologise for some things, but also maybe get on the front foot and defend the organisation against some of the allegations of bias.

4:05But actually, what we had is the two biggest figures on the editorial side of the BBC leaving their jobs. An extraordinary day. Yeah, what an escalation over really quite a short period of time. And their departures came after a dossier was leaked to The Telegraph last week. And it was written by a guy called Michael Prescott, who most of us have probably never heard of before. And he accused the BBC of serious and systemic bias in its coverage of issues, including Donald Trump, Gaza and trans rights. So can you bring us up to speed? Who is he? What was this dossier? And why did he write it? So Michael Prescott's background is he is a PR executive.

4:47Before that, in his earlier career, he was a journalist. He was a political editor of the Sunday Times. Now, he was not a full member of a BBC committee, but what he was was a independent external advisor to one of the BBC's very important committees, which is the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, essentially looking at how editorial is handling stories. He left that role in June, having done it for three years. Right, OK. And who put him on that board? How did he end up there? So this is the question that leads some people to say there's a real sort of huge political dimension to this story.

5:28So Michael Prescott was handed this advisory job by an interview panel of four people. But crucially on that four-person panel was one of the BBC's board members, Robbie Gibb. Now, this is very important because Robbie Gibb is someone that people say has a clear political background. He was Director of Communications for Theresa May's government when she was in Downing Street. He helped set up GB News, the right-wing news channel, and is a sort of supporter of the Conservative Party. So in that sense, he comes from a very clear political direction. And we were told that he was the one really pushing for Prescott to be handed this advisory role.

6:11It's also been previously reported that the pair were friends. I have put that to both of them. They haven't denied it, but they haven't confirmed it either. I should say Prescott says actually he's never been a member of a political party and he's made his criticisms with no political agenda. Right okay but so he took it upon himself did he to write a kind of valedictory note after he left his position to say here are all of the things where I think the BBC has got some serious questions to answer and it is probably worth making clear at this point that he wasn't really carrying out his own new investigations was he but kind of aggregating existing complaints and complaints which in many cases the BBC says have actually already been dealt with, already been addressed internally.

6:55That's right. He says that he decided to put it together because he continued to have concerns, but also he says that the BBC simply weren't taking these issues seriously enough. So he put this together, he sends it to lots of people, the BBC board. It ends up in the hands of the Telegraph, who over the course of the last week have revealed its findings and it escalated to the point at which these people in these big jobs have gone. Yeah, and let's take each of the issues that he discusses in turn, starting with the one that has grabbed most of the headlines as well as the attention of the most powerful man in the world.

7:33And that is an episode of the BBC documentary series Panorama. It was broadcast by the BBC in October last year. It was called Trump, A Second Chance, and it was made for the BBC by an independent production company called October Films Limited. What happened? Yeah, so this is the issue, I think. It's probably become the totemic issue of the Prescott letter, probably because it's the easiest to understand in some regards. It refers to an edition of Panorama in which they looked at the second term of Donald Trump. And essentially, the issue is around a speech Trump gave ahead of the Capitol riots.

8:13We're going to 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. And what they've done there is they've taken two clips of the speech, they spliced them together and Prescott argues, and it does seem that that made it seem as if it was much clearer that Trump was trying to incite the crowd, which was obviously the crucial allegation against him ahead of that event. Now, the question is, how serious a breach is this? Splicing it together without making it clear, did it change the meaning?

8:49And actually, Prescott says it did change the meaning and it was a serious, serious error. But did it really change the meaning? Because a congressional committee has decided, has ruled that Donald Trump did incite the January 6th rioters, just maybe not in the exact sentence that was broadcast in this documentary. Yeah, so there's a debate, obviously, within the BBC about how serious this was. There seems to be quite widespread agreement that it was a mistake. It should simply have been clearer that it was cut from two different parts of the speech. And the other huge element to this, which is why on earth the BBC took so long to either defend itself or say anything about this issue, that potentially it could have dealt with, corrected and moved on.

9:35but instead it's escalated in the way it has. Concerns were raised about this back in May, it seems, and nothing had happened in the interim. But I think the wider point here is this has been taken by Prescott and put into a letter outlining every single issue from one political point of view that he sees as a concern for the BBC. And those concerned about that element, that political element of this, says it has to be seen in that context. This is an amalgamation of things thrown at the BBC from one political point of view, which has sort of led to this outcome now. The apologising is for the way the team edited President Trump's speech to his supporters on January the 6th.

10:21And that was the wrong call? It was a mistake? Is that what you're saying? Yes. And are you going to be apologising directly? And on at least this matter, the BBC does seem to have conceded that it erred. Samir Shah, the BBC chair, sent a letter to Parliament's Culture Select Committee on Monday, apologising for the error of judgement, and said, we accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action. But he did defend the BBC against the other allegations, including its guards' coverage.

10:59Michael, the last time you came onto the show was to explain how Gaza had become such a headache for the BBC, following a series of rows, including over its Glastonbury coverage, with that Bob Villain chant of death to the IDF, and also two documentaries. There was one about medics in Gaza, which was never broadcast by the BBC, and another about children in Gaza, where the main child narrator turned out to be the son of a Hamas official. In terms of Gaza, what did Michael Prescott have to say in his dossier about the BBC's coverage? And how serious do you think his claims were? He made a series of claims, many of which were about BBC Arabic, BBC Arabic service.

11:41And essentially what he was saying there were two things really. One, that BBC Arabic was dealing with stories in a different way to the main BBC output was. It was making claims about the elevation of claims from Hamas over other things. And the general allegation here is that it was sort of trumpeting anti-Israel points of view. I think the other very serious part was a claim about the people and contributors that it was using. Freelancers. Listing some people who had given some very strong anti-Semitic comments in their sort of online social media profiles, for example, were used as contributors repeatedly.

12:22Yeah, and this is really two contributors in particular. I've got some of their posts here and they really were nakedly anti-Semitic. One of them posted that Jews should be burned, as Hitler did, and he appeared 244 times in 18 months on BBC Arabic service. And there was another man who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as devils. He appeared 522 times in the same period. Yeah, that struck out to me as the most serious issue there. There again, the question is, to what degree had these issues been dealt with? Are they historic? Are they ongoing? For example, the BBC would say, well, on BBC Arabic, quite a lot has changed in recent months in terms of the oversight and how it's run.

13:12It says it doesn't use the people cited now. So there's a question there about are these current allegations still valid? How much has been dealt with as well? And there's pushback from the BBC on that point. Yeah, I mean, Samir Shah said on Monday that the BBC Arabic team has been restructured. He said that a new Arabic-speaking head of editorial quality and standards has been appointed in the World Service. And he also said that a new social media research unit has been set up to verify those who appear on the service. Yeah, that's right. And that documentary about Gars and Medics that the BBC commissioned, then didn't run, that caused a huge controversy, some anger within the BBC, you thought that was a story that should have been told.

13:55So you'd certainly get criticism from the other direction as well. Right, okay. And trans rights is the third topic that Michael Prescott raises. And this is a topic that's been difficult for the BBC and many other media organisations in recent years. What did he have to say about how BBC News deals with the competing views of gender-critical feminists and trans-right activists? He said that essentially there were forces at the BBC or a journalist trying to effectively censor what the BBC did in terms of covering of these issues, trying to stop coverage perhaps of some voices for women's rights in a way that made the coverage more liberal left wing.

14:34This is actually something the people at the BBC are pushing back quite hard on. They simply say that that's simply not the way the BBC works and it simply isn't the case that one person can veto the way coverage is done. So on that point there's quite a lot of pushback. Right okay and the BBC has been accused by some people including its own presenter Nick Robinson on the Today programme of kind of paralysis over the last week and just standing back while this drought unfolded and you know reached the White House where you had the White House spokesperson calling the BBC 100 % fake news. What took them so long and why were they just so reluctant to come out and and apologize or defend their journalism?

15:14So this is an absolute key part of this story and actually it's something that's plagued the BBC. How on earth does it react? It's an organization that's always under political pressure because it's paid for by licensed fee payers. Everyone feels ownership of it. It's constantly under political attack. So when it hits a crisis like this, quite often paralysis is the outcome. Now on this, you really have to understand the background of what's going on here. I'm told that Deborah Turness, obviously one of the people who have left their posts as a result of all this, was pushing to say something about the Trump edit, maybe apologize, maybe come out and defend the BBC a bit more on the wider issues of bias.

15:58There was some indecision on the board about not to do that. And this is the problem that the BBC is overseen by this board. And seemingly, the BBC couldn't say anything until there was agreement. You have to understand that the timeline that's driving all this is that Parliament's Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee asked the BBC's leadership to respond to these allegations from Prescott. And it set a deadline of Monday to do that. And so all of this behind-the-scenes pressure has been adding up to how on earth the BBC is going to respond to this committee on Monday. Now, in the meantime, people were saying, let's say something, let's get on the front foot, let's deal with this Trump problem and move on.

16:39But the decision has been made to wait for this response to the select committee. And the net effect has been this vacuum where the BBC has come under attack, relentless attack, a growing attack over the last week. And there simply hasn't been the official response to defend it.

17:00And then came this pretty shock move on Sunday night, which surprised you, as you said, and many people at the BBC when Tim Davy and Deborah Turnis both fell on their swords. They're not household names to many people. Can you just tell us a little bit about each of them and why did they say that they were resigning? With Tim Davy, it really seems to be, by all accounts, a cumulative issue. In other words, He's faced all sorts of criticism. It has been a pretty torrid year. You'll remember we've had issues over Gary Lineker and his social media activity, if you remember that one. Yes. We've also had the chanting of death to the IDF at Glastonbury, which went out on a live feed.

17:42The BBC, again, slow to respond to that crisis. He was criticised for that. All on top of the fact he's having to deal with the BBC's future. Of course, we should state the obvious, it's under huge pressure, not just over its funding, but the huge changes in media consumption. He's having to think about all that. And so when it came to this issue, it just feels like it was the final straw for him. Now on Deborah Turness, it's an interesting one. I stepped down over the weekend because the buck stops with me. 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.

18:22Why did you fail to deal with the mistakes that were made? And see my teams. Thank you so much. The central allegation is one of BBC bias, that the BBC is sort of liberal left bias on these big issues. A lot of people at the BBC say, well, actually, Deborah Turness, she came from running ITN, very experienced news person, very serious news person. But they say actually she was one of the people who was trying to widen coverage to perhaps appeal to reform voters, for example, to expand the BBC's appeal, to reach those people who there's been a suggestion they've been feeling alienated from the BBC.

19:02So trying to increase trust amongst that group, of course, getting criticism for that too. Some people saying that's inappropriate, that actually the BBC shouldn't be doing so much on that front and reform and everything else. The BBC can never win, can it? But yeah, yeah. So this is it. But the key point is it wasn't necessarily her. It was the obvious person when you thought about allegations of bias. There seemed to come a point from my reading of it where she just concluded she had an impossible job. US President Donald Trump sends a letter to the BBC threatening legal action over the panorama edit of his January the 6th speech.

19:40It sounds like it's ultimately about reputation management and the reputation of the BBC. But do you think that there was also a financial calculation in these resignations? We learned on Monday that Donald Trump has sent a letter to the BBC threatening to sue for$1 billion and insisting that the Panorama documentary is pulled. The BBC said it had confirmed receipt of the letter and that it would respond to Trump in due course. Do you think this was something the BBC was worried about? Well, we've certainly seen in the aftermath of all this, Trump has tweeted about it. His press secretary has almost been gloating about this issue.

20:20And clearly Trump is known for using what we'd call lawfare really against media organizations. We've seen him go after the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. So the Trump issue is clearly the one that was felt most acute at the organisation in terms of an editorial issue here. And supporters of the BBC, including David Yelland, who was formerly the editor of the Sun tabloid newspaper, people like him have called this a coup, an internal coup, a political coup. Why are they saying that? And to what extent do those allegations carry water, do you think? Well, there's certainly people in the BBC believe it and use that kind of language.

21:01And the reason is, as I say, it's about this wider macro political background to what's going on here. So on the one hand, you have failings and real failings. You also have the BBC's inability or refusal to defend itself over a critical period. But then you have the politics. and as I say this seems to go back to a sort of Johnson era attempt to shift some of these institutions politically. Gibb joins the BBC board at that time, this figure who's seen as a political figure on the right, he joins the board at a time that Boris Johnson is in government and you can sort of draw a line, say the people who were worried about this coup idea between Johnson's government appointing Gibb, Gibb having a big voice, him pushing for Prescott as part of a panel and then Prescott with his findings appealing to people like Gibb who can then in board meetings and this sort of thing with a weak board push the argument that there are real sort of issues of bias here that's the allegation now the BBC say well Gibb is on the board but he's one voice among 13 Prescott is also he was one of a member of a panel but the issue here is the dynamics of it, that if he is a big voice with a clear view on some of these things, always from the same direction, and you have a board that isn't expert on these things, not confident in editorial issues, you can see how that could sort of direct the conversation.

22:33But still, having said that, quite extraordinary that it has led to these resignations. Yeah, and in terms of Robbie Gibb and the Gaza issue, there would be people within and out with the BBC who could justifiably ask some questions about him because of his role with the Jewish Chronicle newspaper. He led a consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle in 2020, but it was weirdly mysterious who actually owned it. And he was involved until August 2024 as a director. And this was a period when the newspaper was accused of publishing fabricated articles about a senior Hamas official. Can you just tell us a little bit about that?

23:13Yes. So those who are worried about Gibbs' involvement on these Middle East issues, they do point to that as one of the issues. It should be said he's no longer with the Jewish Chronicle, but the argument still stands that he would push a sort of more pro-Israel line.

23:35Coming up, who on earth would want to run the BBC now?

23:52If this is a coup, if I was going to orchestrate a coup, I would want to know who I wanted to replace the people that I was ousting. Who would Robbie Gibb like to see as the Director General of the BBC, do you think? Well, I mean, it's a good question to ask. We're in the very foothills of this story. So who next for the BBC? Director General is a huge question and will the board feel they have to appoint someone from particular political slant. But I think there's another question here, really, which has been put to me by BBC people, which is that if you have the huge furore around this sort of thing, which seems to hit the BBC all the time, what you're going to end up with is people who aren't as good.

24:36It's going to lower the calibre of people willing to do the job. Who on earth is going to want to do these jobs? That is the sort of plaintive cry that's been put to me. There's huge pressure. There are huge jobs. You're dealing with thousands of people. Some say the jobs are too big and unmanageable anyway. And now you have sort of huge political pressure as well. You make it sound very much like a poison chalice, but who are the runners and riders? What names are you hearing? So obviously it's early days. I have had someone at the BBC say, surely it's time for the first woman director general.