FEATURE
01/03/2026
Fight…Fight…Fight. Bravo the BBC, writes Paul Connew, for effectively hijacking Donald Trump’s own pet slogan in its determination to battle that massive $10bn dollar ‘Panoramagate’ documentary lawsuit brought against it by the US president.
With attacks on the BBC and others, Trump “risks sinking to the levels of authoritarian regimes”.
Photograph: Donald Trump: Daniel Torok, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
No surrender is Auntie’s position in a case being watched by US journalists as keenly as it is in the UK in what amounts to a defining defence against Trump’s obsessive declaration of war against the mainstream media. A war being conducted under the false flag of ‘free speech’ and protecting the public from the ‘enemies of the people’ as he labels / libels those media outlets who defy him or decline to buckle under the pressure from the most powerful figure on the planet.
The new year’s resolution message from the BBC has been to file a motion to dismiss, variously claiming the court in Trump’s Florida home state lacks personal jurisdiction, the venue is “improper”, and that Trump’s claim the documentary was available in the US via its BritBox streaming service is simply untrue. Most important, arguably, that the president’s legal team has failed to “plausibly allege” the 2024 documentary was made with “actual malice” – a requisite when filing for defamation in the US.
Fully aware of the global reputational risks, political fallout and financial costs to the public purse of defeat, the BBC hierarchy under Chairman Samir Shah are up for the fight, partly out of necessity and partly out of genuine principled conviction that media freedom is on the line.
But who’s bluffing who?
Shah and the BBC legal team are also buoyed by the view of most US legal experts that, given the First Amendment of the American Constitution, it is Trump not themselves who would face defeat should the president plough ahead to trial in 2027. Which might explain why certain intermediaries and pro-Trump media figures began hinting before Christmas that the president might settle for a “mere” 10 million or so dollars and a more fulsome apology than the BBC has already given over the speech ‘splicing’ fiasco that triggered the resignations of Director General Tim Davie and news supremo Deborah Turness.
But they are also fully braced for the risk that such is the combination of Trump’s narcissism, resentment of media criticism, growing sense of omnipotence and addiction to lawsuits that he will shrug off any legal advice to drop the case. No matter what the best legal brains might argue, The Donald will never be short of US lawyers willing to do his bidding and might even have a chance of winning in a Florida court. That said, wise heads are telling the BBC that even the relatively supine, conservative majority US Supreme Court would be unlikely to uphold that verdict because of the constitutional implications.
None of the above removes the fact that the ‘tape splicing’ episode was a colossal embarrassment for the BBC, potentially the costliest own goal in its history. But misleadingly merging two different segments of Trump’s speech into one was undoubtedly incompetent cockup not the cynical conspiracy the US president alleges. His lawsuit claims the BBC is guilty of “intentionally, maliciously and deceptively” editing the January 6th speech he gave ahead of a mob of extremist supporters violently storming the US Capitol in support of his claim he had been robbed of victory against Joe Biden.
The Trump lawsuit asserts the BBC seriously damaged his reputation, something the corporation has already denied on the basis it didn’t impact on his re-election.
Telegraph scoop goes nuclear
It is also true that no one spotted the splicing blunder when the Panorama special, ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’, aired on October 28, 2024. It was only months later that the fatal flaw was spotted and reported to BBC chiefs in an internal memo compiled by a former independent editorial standards adviser to the corporation. But the proverbial only hit the fan when the memo was mysteriously leaked to the Daily Telegraph and the paper’s scoop ignited the ongoing political and legal nuclear firestorm. Ever since, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy have been walking the tightrope between defending and criticising the national broadcaster while evading Trumpian demands they somehow punish the BBC.
So why are US journalists and media freedom groups so interested in the Trump v BBC showdown? The answer is that the offensive he launched against much of the MSM in his first term has been turbocharged in his second.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) which ‘monitors press freedom predators worldwide’ has compiled a timeline of Trump 2.0’s assaults on the media and warns that he “risks sinking to the levels of authoritarian regimes”.
An all-out war
North America Executive Director Clayton Weimers puts it this way: “It’s easy for Donald Trump’s individual attacks on our press freedom to wash away into the constant churn of the news cycle. But put them all together and one conclusion is unavoidable; the US president is waging an all-out war on press freedom and journalism. Trump is a press freedom predator. Any coverage, journalist, or outlet that displeases him becomes a target, and not just with empty threats. He and his administration have gone out of their way to punish, investigate, damage, defund, and castigate the independent news media. Trump’s war on press freedom has dramatic consequences for American democracy and trustworthy news coverage worldwide, and needs to be stopped.”
RSF officials argue in a hard-hitting study that Trump’s increasingly authoritarian approach rivals that of Putin in terms of “ruthless dictator” mindset against the media.
“In his second term in office, though, Trump has matched his history of violent rhetoric with a series of concrete actions that have severely damaged freedom of the press in the United States and around the world. In the past months, he has censored government data, dismantled America’s public broadcasters, weaponised independent government agencies to punish media that criticise his actions, halted aid funding for media freedom internationally, sued disfavoured outlets, applied pressure to install cronies to lead others and more…”
The report also cites a Gallup finding that Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the MSM are a major factor in why only 28% of Americans now have a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of trust in the media.
A sample list to reckon with
The report added a long list of examples. Only space here to sample a few:
January 20: Trump issued an executive order “ending federal censorship” effectively eliminating government monitoring of misinformation and disinformation. It was his first day back in the White House.
January 22: Trump crony and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr reinstated previously dismissed licensing complaints against three major US TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, for their 2024 election coverage but declined to reinstate a similar complaint against Trump’s favoured Fox News.
January 24: Trump axes more than $268m allocated by congress to support global media freedom.
February 6: Trump imposes sanctions against International Criminal Court officials in retaliation for investigating alleged war crime attacks on journalists in Gaza by Israel.
February 11: Trump bans reporters from the AP news agency from the White House for refusing to adopt his demand that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America.
February 25: The White House announces it alone will decide which news organisations attend press briefings, adding a host of obscure right-wing outlets and Trump-adoring individual influencers.
March 14: Trump issues a decree dismantling the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees funding allocation to US public broadcasters including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Middle East Broadcasts. The same day, the president makes a speech accusing the MSM falsely of “illegal behaviour” and urges his appointed Department of Justice leadership to “target” his perceived media “enemies”.
April 13: Trump announces law firms who do pro bono work protecting journalists “will face punishment”.
April 25: Trump orders the Justice Department to rescind a policy preventing them from being able to seize and search journalists’ phones.
May 13: Wire service journalists he dislikes are banned from the Air Force One press corps for his trip to the Middle East.
July 18: ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ on CBS is cancelled after the popular late-night host criticises a legal settlement between the network’s parent company, Paramount, and the president, casting a pall over CBS’s political independence. (*A number of multimillion-dollar payouts to the president by TV networks are of particular concern to campaigners because, in most cases, legal experts predicted Trump would lose but big corporate owners allegedly gave in because the president had the power to block or delay major mergers or takeovers they were involved in.)
July 19: Trump sues the Wall Street Journal for its report on his ties to the disgraced paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. To be fair to WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch, he has refused to settle Trump’s familiar figure, $10bn, and the lawsuit has gone intriguingly quiet since. (Although Murdoch’s Fox News remains Trump’s favoured channel, sources close to the media tycoon say he is fully committed to backing the WSJ). Meanwhile, the New York Times has pledge to fight a massive lawsuit brought against it by Trump over its coverage of his 2024 election campaign.
September 19: The Department of Defense (now renamed ‘Department of War’ on Trump’s orders) requires reporters to sign an unconstitutional oath pledging to “only publish information authorised for public release”… prompting the vast majority of the Pentagon press pool to refuse and walk out en masse.
September 29: YouTube, one of the largest sources of news for Americans, agrees to pay $24.5m to settle a lawsuit Trump brought after his social media accounts were frozen in the wake of the infamous January 6th 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection – the event at the heart of the will-it-won’t-it happen $10bn lawsuit against the BBC.
November 18: Trump dismisses the 2018 infamous murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and defends Saudi Arabia ruler Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite previous US intelligence reports that his staff were directly involved. The same day, Trump hit the headlines by shouting ‘Quiet, piggy’ at senior Bloomberg journalist Catherine Lucy, one of a number of misogynistic insults he has hurled at multiple female journalists so far in Trump 2.0.
The RSF list just covered 2025, but the outrages continue. In January, at least six journalists in Minneapolis complained they had been “violently assaulted” by federal ICE agents while covering Trump’s controversial crackdown on protesters against immigration seizures.
Little wonder, then, that so many American journalists and media campaign groups are envious of the BBC’s freedom from big commercial ownership and desperately counting on ‘Auntie’ to hold her nerve and either force Donald Trump to drop his lawsuit or deliver a humiliating, high profile presidential bloody nose if he takes it all the way to trial.
The ‘Fight, Fight, Fight’ legal dramarama certainly has a long way to run yet with the BBC inevitably cast in a starring role opposite the man who stands accused of attempting to turn America into a media-repressed autocracy.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.