Donald Trump’s lawsuits against big media companies—backed up by the threat to abuse regulatory power against them—have made U.S. companies subservient and afraid to air criticism. Now he is attempting to extend his threats to punish the British media, starting with the venerable BBC.
The New York Times reports:
[T]wo senior executives who had oversight of the BBC Panorama film, “Trump: A Second Chance?”, both said they believed it never aired in the United States. They asked for anonymity because they did not have permission to speak publicly. The BBC did not respond to a question about where the documentary was distributed.
If the executives are right, that could allow the BBC’s lawyers to argue that Florida is the wrong jurisdiction to hear the case. …
The problem for Mr. Trump is that in Britain, where the film aired in October 2024, he has missed the 12-month statute of limitations for filing a libel suit. Britain would have been a less attractive venue, in any event, because the maximum damages awarded in such cases is capped at about 300,000 pounds, or $395,000. …
Beyond the BBC’s actions, lawyers said, Mr. Trump would also need to demonstrate that the editing of the film substantially altered the way people viewed the events of Jan. 6, 2021. …
The BBC acknowledged that the footage was edited to take separate statements by the president—“We’re going walk down to the Capitol,” and “We fight. We fight like hell”—which were uttered about 50 minutes apart, and made them sound like a single statement that could be interpreted as a call to arms.
BBC News has said it did not intend to mislead anyone. It said in a statement that its editing meant “to convey the key messages of the speech in a condensed format, since the whole speech was over an hour long.”
Legal experts noted that multiple documentary accounts of Jan. 6 suggested that the president incited the crowd to attack the Capitol, a conclusion endorsed by the House of Representatives, when it voted to impeach the president on a count of “incitement of insurrection.”
It is disturbing that the BBC’s first line of defense is that the documentary never aired in the U.S., because that is the whole value of having foreign media outside the reach of presidential intimidation. While they suppress criticism at home, authoritarians also need prevent it coming in from outside, particularly in their country’s own language.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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