Trump Goes After the BBC for Telling True Lies About His Insurrection
He and the U.K. right are making bad faith attacks on the broadcaster to extract a heavy price for a small editorial error
There was a predictable amount of gloating from the political right in the U.K. over the resignations of Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and Deborah Turness, its chief executive of news, after a report earlier this month in the conservative Daily Telegraph showed that the BBC had altered Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 speech for a documentary it aired last October. The report prompted Trump to threaten a lawsuit against the British broadcaster seeking “anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion.” The conservative commentator Peter Hitchens likened the BBC to the Soviet Union and said that it “needs a revolution” in order to be sorted out. In the three days following the departures, The Spectator, one of the U.K.’s premier conservative outlets, ran stories with the following headlines:
Why the BBC Keeps Getting it Wrong
The Rot at the BBC Runs Far Deeper Than Tim Davie
The BBC’s Fake News Blindspot
I’m a Fan of the BBC—But Even I’m Struggling to Defend It
Inside the BBC’s Impartiality Meltdown
How Groupthink Captures the BBC
The BBC Has Been Taken Over By Middle-Class Brats
Not be outdone, however, the right-wing Reform Party UK leader Nigel Farage described the organization as “rotten to the core” and as an “elitist monolith funded by the British public, which devotes itself to pouring scorn on our great country’s history, culture, sovereignty and democracy.”
The resignations were also a cause for celebration in the White House, with Trump personally thanking the Telegraph in a Truth Social post for exposing the “corrupt ‘journalists’” responsible for “doctoring” his “very good (PERFECT!) speech.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X screenshots of two news reports, the first headlined “Trump Goes to War With ‘Fake News’ BBC” and the second “Tim Davie Resigns as BBC Director General Over Trump Documentary Edit,” with the first captioned “Shot” and the second “Chaser.” Trump’s post went on to say: “These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election. On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!” Of course, the claim that the documentary aimed to “step on the scales” of a U.S. presidential election is absurd, since it was aired to the British public, not American voters.
MAGA Lies vs. BBC Errors
But the White House’s response to the BBC shakeup is absurd in a deeper, more significant way. What the BBC did was sloppy and misleading, yes, and there is no justification for it—but its conclusion is unmistakably true: Trump incited an insurrection against the government of the United States (more on this below).
Where the BBC erred was in splicing together two separate moments from Trump’s speech, moments that were nearly an hour apart in his original address, without any indication that the footage had been edited this way. The documentary presented Trump as saying, in one, uninterrupted, complete thought, “We’re going to 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.” The problem is that everything before “and we fight” was uttered nearly an hour before the “fight” portion was. So the documentary’s edit had the effect of presenting Trump’s words that day as a more explicit and direct instigation of violence than they were.
The editorial misstep here is compounded by the fact that Trump’s Jan. 6 speech was disgraceful in its own right—it didn’t need to be edited in the way the BBC did in order to draw out its damning nature.
The BBC is not the first, nor will it be the last, news organization to slip up in its coverage of Trump, a singularly challenging figure for the journalistic profession given his unabashed norm-breaking. But to make the BBC’s editorial error the most salient aspect of this story is to play into Trump’s hands and do his bidding—a travesty given that it has held itself accountable, something that this president is constitutionally incapable of doing.
Broadcaster Blues
Over the years, many valid criticisms have been leveled against the BBC, as well as some spurious ones. The organization has been accused of harboring an anti-Israel bias, especially in its Arabic language service, and of having an internal antisemitism problem. (Some advocates of the Palestinian cause beg to differ.) Brexiteers lambasted the pessimistic tone of its coverage of Brexit’s consequences, while critics of Brexit noticed the BBC’s failure to adequately confront the flurry of lies that the Brexit campaign routinely peddled. In the past couple of weeks, the organization again found itself in the midst of the culture war over trans rights.
But the BBC remains one of the more trusted legacy media institutions, including by those on the British right. Forty-seven percent of people self-identified as leaning to the right trust the BBC—essentially the same proportion that trust the Telegraph, The Times, or ITV. In comparison, and while not a direct analogy given the differences in public funding for the two organs, just 12% of Republicans in the U.S. trust their National Public Radio. The BBC has also avoided massive partisan swings of the kind that destroyed the reputation of Poland’s public broadcasting.
The idea that the BBC has been a singular failure and a disgrace, in a way that warrants unprecedented policy action, is hyperbolic and unserious. The idea that, like many massive media organizations, it sometimes struggles to navigate the fast-moving, decentralized information environment brought about by the advent of the internet, social media, and wild populist politics is undoubtedly true. It certainly has its blind spots—and it sometimes fails the standards enforced by British media regulators.
But none of these considerations should eclipse two far more important, though very simple, questions that have received not even a fraction of attention from conservatives that the BBC’s flaws and missteps have. One: Did Donald Trump incite a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn the 2020 election? And two: Should foreign leaders have a say in editorial choices and staffing made by media organizations in free and sovereign countries?
Trump’s Insurrection
The answer to the first question matters because it qualifies the gravity of Panorama’s—the BBC program responsible for the documentary—editorial transgression. It also qualifies the gravity of Trump’s own standing as a supposed aggrieved party in his conflict with the British public broadcaster. As then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, put it in the days following the Jan. 6 attack, “there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.” The assault on the Capitol was done “in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.”
Surely the fact that the U.S. president is an insurrectionist carries more weight than a bad editorial decision that, furthermore, did not directionally misrepresent the underlying facts of Jan. 6?
The crux of the right’s furor over the BBC’s collation of two separate instances from Trump’s speech on that day is that it misrepresented his words and his intentions. It did not. Trump has often pointed to the fact that he included the words “peacefully and patriotically” as part of his call to action. But as The New York Times’ David French put it last year:
When you’re looking at the test ... of whether a speech is actual incitement to violence, there’s not any one single set of magic words that inoculate you against an incitement to insurrection or incitement to rebellion. ... The entire thing is whipping the crowd into a frenzy. He brings the crowd, knows they’re armed, demands that they go to the Capitol, says they should fight like hell. All of this was set up for what occurred.
Moreover, to exclusively focus on his speech when determining whether Trump fomented an insurrection to stay in power misses the crucial surrounding context. Zooming out, Trump waged a months-long delegitimization campaign against the integrity of the U.S.’s electoral democracy that primed the pump for his speech on Jan. 6. His incitement of insurrection wasn’t a discrete event but an ongoing campaign that culminated in a self-coup attempt by his most ardent supporters.
Certainly the BBC should have indicated it was culling Trump’s statements from two separate parts of his speech. But its editorial decision did not materially alter the takeaway from Trump’s actions in the lead up to and on Jan. 6: he sent a mob of supporters to the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election so that he, not the election’s rightful winner, would be installed as president for the next four years.
Trump’s Foreign Editorial Interference
The answer to the second question matters, too. Even if one posits, for the sake of the argument, that the BBC is thoroughly rotten and acted in an unconscionable way, surely that is a matter for the British political class to address—not for the president of the United States. But the Trump White House has engaged this issue as if the BBC were an American news organ, entities which Trump also mistakenly believes are subject to his editorial direction. Leavitt claimed that the BBC “is dying because they are anti-Trump Fake News” and urged the British public to watch GB News, a right-wing news network, instead. The Trump White House’s anti-BBC campaign actually manages to meddle into a foreign nation’s affairs more than anything the British broadcaster has done.
In fact, in any other context, but especially between allies, the Trump administration’s crusade against the BBC would be immediately treated as unacceptable foreign interference. The reason it is not in this case is not just that Trump’s attack on the BBC is aligned with the priors of a large contingent of British right-wingers. It’s because, just like in the case of Canada weeks earlier, America’s enormous might and its ability to inflict economic damage on the U.K. through tariffs or other measures creates a significant chilling effect.
In the short run, U.S. allies—especially the British who feel like their “special relationship” is the only game in town—are likely to put up with a lot of humiliation. The seeds that the Trump administration is planting in the hearts of our allies through its hubris and arrogance will eventually bear their fruit. When that happens, nobody in Washington should pretend that they had not been warned about the irreversible damage that one man’s fragile ego could inflict on America’s soft power and its global standing.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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I dislike Trump as much as the next person but what the BBC did splicing that together was completely offside. The only reason one might say it wasn’t is that lying journalism of this sort has been normalized in the west by what I used to consider my group, the left. Sorry no excuses and the BBC deserves anything it has coming. Moral clarity is no place for journalism, I’ll make up my own mind thank you very much.
Donald Trump led a movement that alleged the 2020 election was fraudulent, and supporters of that movement stormed the US Capitol. He did not directly tell them to do so, though he did say both that they should “fight like hell” and do it “peacefully and patriotically”.
I’ve written and broadcasted extensively on the events of 6 January 2021 for my former employer, the BBC, and I always strived to outline these basic facts.
The editing error was inexcusable under the corporation’s own editorial guidelines. There is also a concerted and politically motivated attack on the BBC’s independence happening right now. Both things can be, and are, true.