Trump has taken his media war global – and the BBC is making it easy for him

The US president is threatening to sue the BBC for $1bn in the latest round of his attacks on the mainstream media. The corporation has made mistakes but this is the moment to fight back, writes Jon Sopel

On Donald Trump’s first full day in office of his first term he went to the CIA headquarters at Langley. It was a Saturday. I had gone down to the White House in the late afternoon to do a live report from there. And I noticed that outside the James S Brady Briefing Room, there was a flipchart with a handwritten note saying “press briefing this evening”. You don’t get news conferences on a Saturday night, so I hung around until it started.

Eventually, in comes the press secretary, Sean Spicer, to make a statement. He read from notes written by Trump himself that we had misreported his inauguration. The crowds for the 45th president were the biggest in history, and no other president had come close.

Writing the first sentence of my news report would be easy. It was President Trump claimed the crowds attending his inauguration were the biggest in history. The second sentence caused a bit more head scratching with our editors. I felt it incumbent upon us to say: “But that’s not true.” Not he says/she says, and only time will tell. But to call it straight. The photos taken from the Washington Monument towards the Capitol demonstrate that, without a shadow of a doubt, the crowds were significantly larger for President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. And because we had verified and double checked, I was clear to say that.

It became our guiding principle from that day on when covering Donald Trump. Be very careful. But then be bold.

It’s a shame Panorama forgot about the first bit. The idiotic splicing together of two bits of Trump’s January 6th speech without any flash or whoosh to indicate this to viewers was worse than a clunky edit – it was just plain wrong.

And boy oh boy, is the BBC now paying a price. It has cost the director general his job, the CEO of BBC News hers – and if Trump isn’t satisfied, it might literally cost the BBC many millions of dollars of licence fee money to pay him off. And the reputational damage to the corporation could be even greater.

So let’s consider the two aspects of this – the first is the BBC, the second is Trump.

The BBC poohbahs need to decide whether they’re going to fight Trump’s latest litigation or move to settle. They should rediscover their backbone and fight.

The Panorama edit, as I say, was wrong. But did it actually mislead viewers? No, it did not. It completely and unnecessarily overcooked what Trump said. But he did say we have to “fight like hell”. He had tweeted out in December of 2020 that people should come to Washington because it was “going to be wild”. The January 6 inquiry found he had fomented the attempted insurrection. And listen to the witness evidence of those who were charged for the events that day. Large numbers of defendants said they were there because they were answering the president’s call.

So, my dear BBC friends, your case is solid. And while we’re at it, the bar for winning a defamation case in the US is far higher than in the UK. What harm did the Panorama do to Donald Trump in a US jurisdiction when the programme wasn’t seen in the US? The iPlayer (to my fury when I lived there) doesn’t work in America.

Apologise for the egregious lapse in editorial standards (if only the corporation had done that when this first came to light), but do not be part of a rewriting of the history of January 6th. There’s too much at stake.

The BBC’s chair told a call with journalistic staff on Tuesday that the reason it took the board a week to issue a statement following The Daily Telegraph leak was that they had to check all their facts and get their ducks in a row.

What? If the newsroom operated like that, there would be no Today programme, World at One, or Six O’Clock News. “We’re unable to bring you this bulletin as it will take us another week to check the facts in our stories.” Journalists on the call have been contacting me in droves to express their horror.

Into that vacuum stepped a gleeful Donald Trump. The war he’s waged against news organisations in the US has now be globalised – and what richer, juicier target could there be than the biggest media brand in the world, the BBC.

He’s had CBS capitulate. Another American network, ABC, has paid him millions to settle a lawsuit. He’s launched a $10bn action against the Wall Street Journal; he’s going after The New York Times. Now it’s the BBC in the crosshairs.

This morning, I nearly spat out my cornflakes when I saw that the Russian embassy had tweeted that the BBC had lost all sense of journalistic ethics. I mean. Irony is dead if the Russians are lecturing about journalistic integrity. And look what strange bedfellows they are in the company of – Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage et al.

That so many are looking to tear down the BBC is instructive. Lesley Stahl, from the US TV show 60 Minutes, recounted how, during Trump’s first term, she asked why he persisted with the whole fake news thing. He replied to her, “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all, so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

There is a strategy in what Trump is doing, and others are trying to ape him. Journalism should not be making it easier for him to do that. By all means, be bold, but get your ducks in a row first.