Trump’s War on the Media Goes International With BBC Apology

(Bloomberg) — Donald Trump notched another victory in his war on the media when the UK’s national broadcaster apologized over a misleading edit of the US president’s remarks and two executives resigned.

By using, or threatening to use, the courts and his administration’s authority, Trump has already forced a series of major concessions from some of the largest outlets in the US. The British Broadcasting Corp.’s decision shows the campaign is reverberating with international consequences.

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BBC Chairman Samir Shah acknowledged on Monday that edited footage of Trump’s speech near the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which aired on the documentary program just before last year’s presidential election, wrongly gave “the impression of a direct call for violent action.” The Telegraph first reported on the issue over the past week.

In a letter dated Sunday, Trump threatened legal action seeking no less than $1 billion in damages if the BBC didn’t issue an apology, retract the documentary and compensate the president appropriately for “harm caused.”

It’s a tack that has proven successful for the president domestically. Two of the four major US TV networks — ABC and CBS — have paid millions of dollars in legal settlements after Trump took issue with their coverage. Walt Disney Co.-owned ABC also temporarily pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air under pressure from the Trump administration. Dozens of journalists turned in their badges at the Pentagon last month rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions designed to curb a “very disruptive” press.

The president has also not held back from inserting himself in foreign reporting. In September, Trump told a reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corp., who asked the president about his personal business dealings, that his questions were “hurting Australia.” Australia’s national broadcaster was later moved to an overflow room for a Trump press conference in the UK, according to the Guardian newspaper.

His administration has also proposed regulations that would mandate foreign media employed on certain visas renew their lawful status every 240 days, giving the government a more active role in reviewing journalists’ work in the US and potentially leading to retaliatory denials of extension requests.

“This is part of an unfortunate pattern that we started to see even before the president was sworn in for this term,” said Kathy Kiely, the Lee Hills Chair in Free-Press Studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “He is kind of the ultimate sore winner.” Trump’s latest push is “clearly the kind of nuisance civil action that is meant to kill any kind of aggressive reporting on him.”

The misleading edit of Trump’s remarks will lend fuel to opponents of the BBC’s status that lets it receive funding through a special TV licensing fee that’s paid annually by UK households. The scandal has the potential to complicate efforts to keep the fee in place and, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Tom Ward, may alienate advertisers abroad.

On Nov. 7, Trump spoke to Parliament member Nigel Farage, whose Reform UK party leads national polls in Britain. “To say he was angry would be an understatement,” Farage told LBC radio on Monday morning. Farage repeated Reform’s claim that swathes of the British public will stop paying the compulsory license fee that funds the BBC.

Trump shows no sign of letting up, especially when he has repeatedly been able to secure results that shut down unflattering coverage, strip adversarial newsrooms of resources and goad outlets into admitting they were in the wrong. As part of a multi-pronged assault, the administration has taken aim at publicly funded broadcast stations, investigating them for their use of sponsorships, and through Congress, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supported National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) — two frequent targets of the president.

Trump is also pushing to dismantle Voice of America, which began broadcasting during World War II and provided news in more than 40 languages to audiences and readers around the world. It stopped all broadcasting last month as part of the government shutdown amid a broader legal effort to disband the outlet.

Trump has found support from Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman who has been an outspoken champion of the president’s campaign against the mainstream media. He was at the center of a national debate over free speech in September after he threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of Disney’s affiliate stations who didn’t take off the air after comments the host made about the killing of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk.

In a social media post after Disney reinstated Kimmel, Trump floated the possibility of legal action against the company and suggested Kimmel’s on-air criticism could be viewed as paid political speech that Disney is donating to Democrats.

Last year, weeks before the start of the president’s second term, Disney was among the first companies to settle a lawsuit Trump brought because of comments made by ABC News host George Stephanopoulos that Trump alleged were defamatory. Disney paid $15 million toward a future Trump presidential foundation and $1 million in legal fees.

By then, Trump had already sued CBS over how the network’s news show edited a quote from an interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris, which he claimed made her sound more coherent, accusing the network of election interference.

CBS maintained that it never changed her words and that trimming quotes for brevity and clarity is journalistic standard. Still, the network’s parent company, Paramount Global, which needed approval from Carr for its pending merger with Skydance Media, agreed to pay $16 million to settle and promised to release transcripts of presidential candidate interviews in the future.

The network has since made major changes, including appointing an ombudsman to oversee complaints about its coverage. After technology heir David Ellison took over the company in August, the renamed Paramount Skydance Corp. acquired the alternative news outlet the and installed founder Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News. She’s been making changes at the network and earlier this month got an interview with Trump.

Trump “cannot let up in his battle against the FakeNews media,” said Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, a conservative media watchdog. “Accountability at the BBC is good, but the real goal is to see fair, fact-based news without this sort of partisan misinformation in the first place.”

The president hasn’t pulled punches even from outlets positioned to be more favorable to him. He lobbed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-owned over its reporting of an off-color note that Trump allegedly penned for Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday.

“We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit,” a spokesperson for the Journal’s parent company said in a statement.

In another defamation lawsuit, Trump is seeking $15 billion from the over its 2025 election coverage, claiming the newspaper serves as a “mouthpiece” for the Democrats. He also pursued defamation claims against the over an election poll that he said exaggerated Harris’ lead on him in the state. Trump recently won a legal victory to continue the case in state court instead of federal court.

“We are assessing the court’s decision,” Lark-Marie Antón, a spokesperson for the Des Moines Register, said in an emailed statement. “In the event the suit is heard by the state courts of Iowa, we have confidence the matter will be adjudicated fairly.”

Media outlets have been scrambling to meet the Trump administration’s edicts, said Christina Bellantoni, a professor at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The lawsuit settlements show that “news outlets really realize that spending a lot of time and money with Trump in court is not worth it for them.” However, she warned that they could set a precedent where news and media and companies are more willing to be influenced by Washington.

“I worry in five years, our media landscape will be completely reshaped and some of these lawsuits are a factor in that,” she said.

The multi-front offensive on the media, and the president’s penchant to play favorites with outlets that praise him, underscores his willingness to use aggressive tactics to secure major changes in coverage and newsroom leadership. But it can also blur the line between outlets exercising editorial judgment and clear abuses of that discretion.

Some outlets, like ABC and CBS, chose to settle their suits with Trump when many legal scholars suggested they had a strong case for winning based on America’s free speech laws. In the case of the BBC, things were different.

“Editors changed the meaning of what Trump actually said,” according to Adam Penenberg, an associate professor at New York University’s School of Journalism.

“When the BBC manipulates meaning, it damages not just its own credibility, but the credibility of the entire profession. That’s a betrayal of the basic trust journalism relies on,” he said.

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