Trump demands a billion from The Beeb
Luckily the dollar is down against the pound.
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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.
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 was all about him.
Defamer in chief
Donald Trump owes his entire political career to defamation.
It began with the racist birther conspiracy about Barack Obama’s birthplace, then cycled through lies about Hillary Clinton’s family foundation, false allegations that Joe Biden took bribes, accusations of vote fraud leveled at civil servants, and finally bizarre claims about Kamala Harris wanting to execute babies.
Trump’s personal social media account, along with the accounts of the White House and multiple government agencies, is flooded with AI slop and claims that Democrats want to “trans” children. And the Department of Homeland Security regularly lies about supposedly “criminal” immigrants and ICE/CBP’s violent abuse of civilians.
Nevertheless, Trump routinely demands 10-figure settlements from media outlets who criticize him. The same day that Trump congratulated himself for ridding the BBC of “corrupt ‘journalists,’” his lawyer Alejandro Brito sent a demand for retraction to BBC Chair Samir Shah. Brito represents Trump on several of his media harassment campaigns masquerading as lawsuits. While he had some success in extracting a settlement from ABC, a recent complaint against the New York Times was so shoddy that the judge immediately yeeted it into the sun for being defective in every way.
Brito’s latest nastygram to the BBC bears a striking resemblance to one he sent in August to Hunter Biden, who suggested in an interview that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania Trump to her husband. Both letters call the speech in question “salacious,” and claim it has “been widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums.” This dissemination is then treated as evidence that Trump was actually damaged by the supposedly defamatory statements.
“Consequently, the BBC has caused President Trump to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” Brito warns.
That’s not how damages work in a defamation case. Trump would be hard-pressed to prove in court that he was actually harmed by a broadcast he never even heard of until last week. The BBC missive is mostly recycled verbiage from other threat letters, with boilerplate references to “the above-referenced false, defamatory, malicious, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” and “the fabricated statements that were aired by the BBC.”
Brito demands that the BBC issue a full retraction and apology and “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused.” He concludes the ransom note with his customary Trumpian flourish.
“If the BBC does not comply with the above by November 14, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. EST, President Trump will be left with no alternative but to enforce his legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and are not waived, including by filing legal action for no less than $1,000,000,000 (One Billion Dollars) in damages,” he writes. “The BBC is on notice. PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.”
“F**k that!”
How the BBC governs itself is as much a political question as a legal one. Tory politicians and the execrable Nigel Farage are using Trump as a force multiplier in their effort to tear down the state-supported broadcaster.
“I spoke to the President on Friday. He just said to me, is this how you treat your best ally?” the Reform Party leader blustered, adding that “we need a very much slimmed down BBC.”
But Trump is deeply unpopular in England, and using taxpayer subsidies to mollify him would likely enrage BBC’s viewers, both at home and abroad.
In some sense, the network is in an analogous situation to ABC after George Stephanopoulos referred to Trump as an adjudicated rapist. In fact, a jury found him liable for sexual assault, not rape. But Stephanopoulos’s careless language gave Trump a toehold and likely contributed to the network’s decision to settle.
Everyone concedes that the Panorama footage was inappropriately edited. Indeed, Shah sent a letter to the House of Commons on Monday apologizing for the “error of judgment” and committing to overhaul the BBC’s standards. But journalistic lapses are not the same as torts.
The statute of limitations for defamation is a year in Britain, and that has already expired. Trump’s home state of Florida has a two-year statute of limitations, and Brito generally files Trump’s trollsuits in Florida courts. But proving damages would be a heavy lift — is there anyone in Florida who actually watched the Panorama documentary and changed their opinion of Trump because of it?
Perhaps the viability of this lawsuit is beside the point, though. Defending itself in court would be expensive and unpleasant for Britain’s national broadcaster — particularly since Trump wields US trade policy to punish foreign government for their speech. Case in point: He just threatened to cut off talks with Canada because the government of Ontario ran an ad correctly noting that Ronald Reagan opposed tariffs.
There are no good options for the BBC. But there are no good options for the US either. Americans are stuck with a leader who is working his way down a list of media outlets demanding millions of dollars in tribute and a promise to curtail speech to conservative preferences.
And so we’re left with the strangest role model of all: Hunter Biden, who refused to bend to Trump’s demands.
“Fuck that,” he said of Brito’s retraction letter. “That’s not gonna happen.”
Stiff upper lip, BBC! Keep calm, and be like Hunter Biden. Tell the bully “Fuck that!”
Or, you know, be like Disney when it canceled Kimmel. How’d that work out again?
That’s it for today
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I just want him to go away…😔
Mr Thin Skin at it again