Beeb Executives Prepare To ‘Batten Down’ for a Potentially Costly Legal Battle With Trump

The BBC will have to “batten down and hire the best lawyers in Florida” if President Trump goes ahead with his threatened lawsuit against the U.K.’s national broadcaster, says a former senior executive quoted on the network’s own website. Mr. Trump has indicated he is planning to do just that, telling reporters on Friday evening aboard a flight to Palm Beach, Florida, from Washington, D.C., that he might even jack up his demand for $1 billion in damages. “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week,” Mr. Trump said a day after the storied broadcaster announced it had “sincerely” apologized to the president but would not offer any financial compensation.“I think I have to do it,” Mr. Trump added. “They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”The publicly financed broadcaster has been deeply shaken by the acknowledgement that a documentary report on the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington was edited in a way to make it appear that Mr. Trump was encouraging violence.In the broadcast, a line in which Mr. Trump said, “And we fight, we fight like hell,” appeared to come immediately after he said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol.” It also omitted a line in which the president urged the crowd “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”The BBC admits that the edit “created the impression” of incitement but claims it was “unintentional.” Nevertheless, the network’s director general, Tim Davie, and its news chief, Deborah Turness, resigned over the incident.“This is a very serious moment in the history of the BBC,” says an article written by the broadcaster’s culture and media editor, Katie Razzall, and published on its website Saturday.The network “stands or falls by being viewed as impartial – a source to trust in a world where trust in institutions is falling,” she writes. “Instead, the corporation is being accused of the opposite – and faces an expensive and very public battle with the most powerful man in the world.”Ms. Razzall says it is clear that BBC executives never seriously considered offering financial compensation to Mr. Trump.The corporation, whose roughly $5 billion budget is largely financed with a license fee charged to all television owners in the U.K., ”believes it has a case that, whatever error was made, no harm was caused to Trump by the Panorama programme,” she writes.“He was elected president soon after it went out and anyway, says the BBC, the programme wasn’t broadcast on any US channels, so how could it have harmed him?”Ms. Razzall adds that network executives agreed that the use of license fee payers’ money to settle with Mr. Trump “was a non-starter.”“As one former senior BBC executive put it to me, after the BBC had rejected offering compensation, ‘they’ve made the right call.’ But this person also said, if the president did decide to sue, the BBC would have to ‘batten down – and get the best lawyers in Florida.’”Ms. Razzall notes that the controversy comes at an especially awkward time for the organization, which is just ramping up negotiations with the government for the renewal of the charter that establishes its funding and regulatory arrangements.“The people at the top of the BBC should be fully concentrating on what is, in normal times, a fundamental moment for the corporation,” she writes, noting that “the details of its very existence” must be determined in time for a new charter at the start of 2028.“Now top BBC brains will be diverted, to game out its next moves in what could be a very damaging, even existential fight with Donald Trump. The legal fees alone could get very expensive,” she says.“This might all have been avoided if the BBC had been open about the error much earlier and corrected it. Instead, it faces a long road.”

Beeb Executives Prepare To ‘Batten Down’ for a Potentially Costly Legal Battle With Trump

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