In recent days, a long-simmering dispute between US President Donald Trump and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has exploded, with Mr. Trump threatening to sue the BBC for 1 to 5 billion dollars for libel. The proximate cause of this is a BBC Panorama documentary about the events of 6 January 2021 in the US capital, at the end of Donald Trump’s first term in office. The Panorama editing of the then outgoing President’s speech to his supporters outside the White House brought together parts that were not contiguous in the original speech. The impression was thus given that the President was encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol, as some of them did after the speech. In a letter responding to President Trump’s accusations, the BBC acknowledged that it had been in the wrong but refused to pay compensation as the President had demanded. Moreover, the BBC presented attenuating circumstances, including that the documentary had not been shown in the US, therefore it had not caused damage to the President with the US electorate, as proven by Mr. Trump’s second presidential win in November 2024.
A legal battle could ensue in US courts, which could lead to a big loss for the BBC, if a jury pronounced on this, especially in a US state friendly to President Trump like Florida. As this article was being written, it was not clear whether an expected call between Mr. Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer would have a calming effect on the President, who might forgive the BBC or settle for an out-of-court compensation of some million dollars, as has already happened with other US media that the President sued in the past. Interesting to note here that such compensation money goes to the Trump Presidential Library and not to the President’s pocket.
In any case, two major issues are on full display here and won’t go away no matter what the final outcome of this particular dispute may be. One is President Trump’s aggressive litigation tactics towards media that are critical of him and his politics, mainly “liberal media” that he seems to detest, not only in the US but abroad too. Such tactics can be seen as amounting to bullying or even censorship – see cases also pending with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, from both of which the President is also demanding billions. The second major issue is the BBC’s impartiality, which has in the past also been questioned by different groups or individuals, notably in recent months regarding its coverage of the war in Gaza. The focus of the rest of this article is on the second issue, the impartiality of the BBC, although references to President Trump’s tactics continue, to the extent that they relate to that.
The BBC prides itself in its objective coverage of the most delicate political, economic, social, environmental and cultural issues. Impartiality is purportedly in the Corporation’s DNA, and certainly is enshrined in its Charter, which is coming up for its periodic ten-year review. A public-service broadcaster, overseen but not run by the UK government and covering its operating costs via a levy on UK households, this media establishment has a long and reputable history well beyond its UK base. At times and in places of persecution and violent conflict, it is often a counterweight to the official propaganda of totalitarian governments, allowing those subject to it and the broader world to retain a sense of sanity and truthfulness.
In light of the above, the BBC may well be a natural opponent and/or target of political movements and power mechanisms that try to get hold of the institutions of state and transform them after their image. This may be valid from the Maduro government in Venezuela to the Putin government in Russia and the Trump administration in the US, considering the relevant illiberal aspects of each. Thus, the current spat between President Trump and the BBC can be seen as one episode in the broader liberal vs illiberal, MAGA vs Woke, principled vs transactional, science-based vs personality-driven news- and decision-making saga.
As of now, the implication of what has been said above is that the BBC is on the right side of democratic principles, freedom of expression and history in the medium to long run. If only things were as simple, though. The Panorama documentary shows a serious lapse in objectivity, if not an ideological bias against one side of the political spectrum that President Trump and his followers personify and in great numbers. Putting together two separate parts of Mr. Trump’s speech may be a natural and unobjectionable thing for somebody who is convinced of Mr. Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies and his moral, if not actual, complicity to the attempted coup on 6 January 2021. In a way, and at the moral level, it is like an extrajudicial execution of alleged Latin American narcotraffickers by the US military under the guidance of President Trump and his Secretary of War. The BBC often puts through stringent verification procedures claims by Mr. Trump and others, and rightly points to their false or inconsistent statements, while it considers unquestionable its own assertions made through the lens of a liberal institution that the BBC apparently is.
Criticism against the BBC on similar to the above grounds has been levelled by the Israeli government and Jewish organizations in the UK, regarding the coverage of the war in Gaza since the Hamas incursion into Southern Israel on 7 October 2023. Another BBC documentary, on the situation in the Gaza Strip that involved the son of a Hamas leader, was in this case the bone of contention and the entry point to undermine the credibility of the BBC and/or force it to change its coverage of the war. Ideally, for those attacking it in this case, the BBC would have to cover mainly the (horrible, it has to be acknowledged) stories about the Hamas treatment of the some 1200 people killed and the 251 taken hostage during the incursion. No human stories should be brought up from the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, the hundreds of thousands injured and the two million left starving and homeless by Israel’s response, and no reference to the decades of often brutal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. To its credit, BBC adjusted but did not budge.
Trying to be objective in view of human suffering on all sides, while also carrying a certain DNA of “liberal” values / biases, plus representing consciously or unconsciously a country with a certain history domestically and abroad, is no easy thing. Add to that the competition with US networks, Al-Jazeera and more, all that makes the job of the recently resigned BBC Director General virtually impossible. One wonders whether the BBC will use the opportunity of Mr. Trump’s attack to rethink its own role and claim to fame. Its record is not so clean in the eyes of people from different backgrounds and with different experiences. Where one sees objectivity in castigating the actions of foreign “regimes”, another can discern one more manifestation of Western and more specifically Anglo-Saxon superiority attitudes amounting to neocolonialism and possibly preparing the ground for interference, even military intervention, as was the case in the last decades in Iraq, Libya and beyond. Russian propaganda mechanisms and attempts at interference in former Soviet Republics is not normally put into context nor compared to Western expansion of NATO and the EU eastwards, or African rejection of former colonial masters, while China is mentioned usually for natural disasters and political purges, but not explained for its economic and social advances. References to “the international community” most often than not refer to pronouncements by the UK and its allies, not even the majority of the UN General Assembly and such representative institutions. There is near-universality in spreading the message in many languages beyond English, thanks to the generous funding provided to the BBC’s international broadcasting arm by the UK Foreign Office, but the message is not so genuinely universal.
Closing on a personal note, the above realizations would not deter the author from indulging in his BBC News watching habits, which denote partly nostalgia of student days in the UK, partly familiarity with the language and the institutions, and partly the declared even if selectively applied objectivity and humanistic principles. In a way, the propagandist you know is the least offensive, but also the least effective, if you can tell from the terminology and other tricks that the selling of a one-sided opinion is being attempted. So, no angel here, but no devil either, rather a behaviourally familiar news agent that requires a more refined filter than others – but still should never be taken without a mental filter well in place.
Dr Georgios Kostakos is Co-founder and Executive Director of the Brussels-based Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability (FOGGS). He has been a UN staff member, including with the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General, the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and field missions for political affairs and human rights. He has also worked with think tanks, academic institutions and as a consultant on global governance and sustainability, peace and resilience.
