It was as obvious as hair dye and fake tan: Donald Trump was always going to sue the BBC, irrespective of whether the broadcaster made a grovelling apology for its astonishingly stupid video editing of a speech delivered shortly before the Capitol was stormed.
Even a plausible offer of compensation – had it been made – would have been insufficient to stay the hand of the man who has already caused immense harm to the public broadcasters of his own country and who has sued American media for billions. The opportunity to strike what he hopes is an existential blow against the progenitor of public broadcasting was irresistible.
There was, therefore, no surprise in his announcement on Saturday that he will sue the BBC for between $US1 billion and $US 5 billion over the clip in a 2024 Panorama programme. I doubt it is a coincidence that $US5 billion almost matches the income the BBC will receive this financial year from public licence fees (the bulk of its annual income) or that $1 billion is the annual corporate cost of running the public broadcaster.
The Panorama clip spliced together two comments that were almost an hour apart to give the impression that Trump had said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.” Stupid? Certainly. Unethical? Certainly. Defamatory? Certainly not. The BBC must defend the suit and must not entertain any notion now of a monetary settlement.
It must not surrender to a bully. Paramount and Disney have already suffered reputational damage settling Trump lawsuits against their respective news divisions. The BBC needs to rebuild its integrity, not further diminish its standing in the eyes of the world.
The Panorama editing was revealed earlier this month by London’s Daily Telegraph. Last Friday it published a further revelation of a similarly edited clip on BBC Newsnight that predated the Panorama broadcast by almost two years. The Telegraph’s latest story also stated that, later in the Newsnight episode, Trump’s previously acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney (who resigned after the storming of the Capitol) had pointed out on air that the clip had combined two comments made many minutes apart. There was no subsequent action by the BBC to correct the record. Mulvaney’s ‘correction’ had plainly been forgotten or buried by the time the Panorama episode was produced.
Trump’s announced lawsuit can have no other purpose than to inflict maximum damage to an institution he regards as a liberal-leaning enemy. It is not born out of a desire to see the record set right. The record has been corrected in no uncertain terms since the Telegraph’s disclosure of a leaked 19-page memo, written by former Times of London journalist and former external adviser to the BBC Board Michael Prescott, that put the doctored clip at the top of a list of concerns over bias in the corporation’s editorial coverage.
Nor can it restore Trump’s reputation. A week after the attack, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for incitement of insurrection. After Trump had left office, the Senate voted 57–43 in favour of conviction, but fell short of the required two-thirds, resulting in his acquittal. He was subsequently indicted on four charges, all of which were dismissed following his re-election to the presidency. That is hardly a resounding testament to innocence. In spite of Trump and the Republican Party’s attempts to rewrite the history of the storming of the Capitol, a significant proportion of Americans believe he did, indeed, incite the mob. The BBC can strongly claim a defence of truth based on the full transcript of his speech.
If he is looking for damages, they have already been exacted. The reputation of the BBC has suffered a hammer blow of Thor-like proportions. That much is evident in the resignations of the director-general Tim Davie and the head of news Deborah Turness. The damage wrought by the disclosures made their positions untenable.
An editorial in the Telegraph said as much but noted that, until the newspaper had published extracts of Prescott’s memo, the BBC’s tactics in the face of accusation of bias had been “a mixture of denial and aggression”. The newspaper may have welcomed an opportunity to take the moral high ground at a time when a potential buyer’s relationship with China was being questioned (the bid for the Telegraph has since been withdrawn). However, the editorial went on to say: “This newspaper is not seeking to destroy the BBC but to ask legitimate questions about the accuracy of its journalism and the culture that underpins it.”
And fair enough, too.
The editing of the video clips for both Newsnight and Panorama was not only inexcusable, it was monumentally stupid. Numerous news outlets covered the entire speech live on 6 January 2021 and five days after it was delivered Al Jazeera posted a full transcript on its website. It is still there if you want to read Trump’s unique version of ‘reality’. Here is the link.
Sooner or later, the unwarranted compression of time would become apparent. You cannot erase 54 minutes between quotes and get away with it.
It was so unnecessary. Armed with the full transcript of the speech, US Democrats had accused Trump of “incitement of insurrection”. It did not require doctored video to demonstrate how he had whipped up the crowd following his electoral defeat. Here’s the ‘fight like hell’ paragraph from the speech:
Our brightest days are before us, our greatest achievements still wait. I think one of our great achievements will be election security because nobody, until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9:00 in the evening and say, ‘I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.’ And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.
There was no need for the BBC to play fast and loose with quotes. They were there in abundance. Had the BBC editors been hell-bent on using the quotes that so took their attention, they could have avoided any misrepresentation by ensuring the clips were in sequence and then inserting three words between them. They simply needed a voice-over stating “he later said”. That would have been more honest than a mere cross-fade but even that would have shown there had been a gap between the two comments.
Donald Trump is an opportunist who has seized on the chance to inflict a potentially mortal wound on an institution – perhaps on a country – that does not subscribe to his worldview. He has been joined by a conservative commentariat questioning whether the BBC has any future.
Of course it has a future, but it also has an extraordinary amount of work to do to rebuild its reputation and public trust.
Remember that the Trump edits were only two on a much longer list of items compiled by Michael Prescott is his investigation of biased coverage by the corporation. There is much to be done if the BBC is to put its house in order. Former BBC head of corporate affairs, Baroness Tina Stowell wrote in the Telegraph that it is losing its moral authority.
Restoring that authority will be the task confronting the people who replace Tim Davie and Deborah Turness. It won’t be the first time its senior executives have had to haul Auntie off the floor. There have been a number of such episodes over the years, but each time it becomes that much more difficult to get her standing steadily on her feet.
The restorative she needs is an unflinching and transparent display – day in and day out – of the tenets of good journalism.
In order to observe those tenets, mainstream news media need robust systems of checks and balances. Their production systems traditionally have been based on recognising that their staff do not possess equal levels of skill and talent. There are some better at fact-gathering, some at writing, and (dare I say it) some at applying sound judgement. By situating people with the required skills at different stages of the process, the checks and balances are applied…or they should be.
Workforce attrition had been an unfortunate feature of journalism for almost three decades as news outlets have faced mounting financial pressures. We can only guess at how damaging the effect has been on the production process on which good journalism relies. For its part, the BBC has axed 2000 jobs in the past five years and in March announced that it is “no longer sustainable” to further reduce its workforce.
‘Sustainability’ in journalism must include the ability to apply these checks and balances. Critically important is the application of sound judgement and that was conspicuously absent in the two BBC episodes concerning Trump. They were stunning examples of the need to ensure there are people with sufficient acumen at each stage of the production process. The edits may not have been picked up by a final run-through with a senior editor before broadcast. Judgement needed to be applied in the edit suite.
The restoration of trust means the existence of such robust processes must also be obvious to the public. Audiences need to be told how and why the news is gathered and presented. It is not good enough for journalists to say “trust us” because too few do. News organisations need to spell out how they work. When they make mistakes – they happen – there must be swift and unembellished admission and correction.
Do not, for one moment, think these admonitions and requirements are limited to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Emphatically they are not. Where goes one, go all.