Outgoing BBC director-general Tim Davie has told staff that Britain’s national broadcaster must “fight” for its journalism as its board weighs up demands for compensation in the threatened $1bn lawsuit by Donald Trump.
Lawyers for the US president said he would sue and seek $1bn in damages in a Florida court if he did not receive a full retraction, apology and appropriate compensation by Friday over a misleading edit of a speech he gave on January 6 2021.
In a speech to staff on Tuesday, two days after his shock resignation, Davie admitted the BBC had made “some mistakes that have cost us”, including the editing in the Panorama documentary that carried footage of Trump’s speech.
But Davie, who quit alongside BBC News head Deborah Turness, added: “I see the free press under pressure. I see the weaponisation. I think we have to fight for our journalism.”
The board of the BBC, led by chair Samir Shah, is still considering its response to Trump’s threat, which was sparked by a leaked internal memo that accused the publicly funded corporation of a series of failures in its coverage.
Figures at the broadcaster said an important factor in a decision to contest claims for compensation would be whether the Panorama programme, which aired in October 2024, was shown in the US — where there is no access to BBC iPlayer, the corporation’s streaming service.
Shah, who has said the BBC made an “error of judgment” in the way it edited footage of Trump’s speech, was considering whether he should offer a full apology to the US president, one of the people said.
BBC bosses are taking legal advice before responding ahead of the Friday deadline.
Culture secretary Lisa Nandy told MPs on Tuesday that the process to review the BBC’s charter, which sets out its governance and funding arrangements, would begin “imminently” and ensure the broadcaster remained “fiercely independent” and “genuinely accountable”.
The government is set to publish a green paper in December with a range of options for the future of the BBC as part of talks over the charter, which is up for renewal in 2027.
Downing Street has insisted that the Trump legal threat is not a matter for Sir Keir Starmer but for the BBC, despite the corporation’s role as an “important national institution”.
The UK prime minister has not made any representations on behalf of the BBC to the White House in defence of the broadcaster in recent days, according to officials.
But Number 10 on Monday said the government in general supported the BBC “in an age of disinformation” and that Starmer did not think it was institutionally biased.
Because the programme was shown in October 2024, Trump is unable to pursue legal action in the UK, where cases must be brought within 12 months of an alleged libel. By contrast, in the state of Florida, where Trump filed his threat to sue, the time limit is two years.
Legal experts said the case was far from clear-cut for Trump since the iPlayer service is not available in the US.
Prateek Swaika, partner at US law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, said “the jurisdictional hurdle of proving Florida viewership of a UK broadcast may not be straightforward”.
Trump’s lawyers told the BBC in a letter that the “fabricated statements . . . have been widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums, which have reached tens of millions of people worldwide”. The president had suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” as a result, they added.
Chris Ruddy, head of conservative US media organisation Newsmax, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the BBC would probably win if it opted to fight the case because the state of Florida had strong libel laws “that defend media companies and free speech”.
Asked by GB News on Tuesday how the BBC should respond to Trump’s legal threat, Conservative shadow culture secretary Nigel Huddleston said the corporation should “grovel . . . because they were wrong”.
The US president has scored a number of notable victories over media groups in the US in recent months, with Paramount agreeing in July to pay $16mn to settle a dispute over an interview broadcast on CBS.
The US network’s willingness to settle the suit sparked concern among free-speech advocates. But media analysts see it as an attempt in part to stay on side with Trump given Paramount’s desire to get his support for its takeover by Skydance, which was finalised in August.
Trump lost a 2023 defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which he alleged the network had likened him to Adolf Hitler, as well as lawsuits against the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Libel lawyer Iain Wilson said, that under US law, it was necessary for a public figure to establish “actual malice”, for example where footage had been “deliberately edited to present a particular narrative with a reckless disregard to accuracy”.
He added: “The BBC could still seek to defend the claim by arguing that the gist of the imputation viewers drew from the broadcast was substantially true. The BBC could also seek to defend the claim on the basis that the Floridian court should not be exercising jurisdiction over it, particularly in relation to a broadcast that was not targeted at US viewers.”
However, other legal experts argue that the threat may be enough. David Allen Green, the lawyer and commentator, said that “for Trump, civil litigation is a form of dealmaking — the promotion of his political and business interests by other means”.
He added: “One should not approach his legal manoeuvres as if they are cases that will go all the way. They are skirmishes intended to force a deal, a compromise, a backdown by the other side.”
Sinead O’Callaghan, managing partner at law firm Cooke, Young, and Keidan, said: “Ultimately, the threat of a billion-dollar claim is as much a tactic to exert pressure on the BBC as it is a statement of legal intent.”
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