Trump tells BBC: apologise by Friday or pay me $1bn

Donald Trump threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn (£760m), accusing it of a “reckless disregard for the truth”.

The US president turned the screw on the corporation as it was reeling from the resignation of director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness over the selective editing of Mr Trump’s speech on the day of the Capitol Hill riot.

A senior official in the Trump administration suggested it “may consider” removing the BBC’s White House passes as a result of the row.

The Telegraph first disclosed on Nov 3 that Panorama spliced together two separate parts of the speech in a way that wrongly suggested Mr Trump had urged his supporters to behave violently. The revelations were contained in a leaked internal memo that also identified anti-Israel and pro-trans bias inside the BBC.

Lawyers acting for Mr Trump sent a legal letter to the BBC on Sunday demanding compensation, an apology and a retraction of “false” and “inflammatory statements” made about him in the Panorama documentary.

Mr Trump’s lawyers said a “failure to comply will leave President Trump with no choice than to pursue” the broadcaster for damages for the “overwhelming financial and reputational harm”. The US president gave the BBC a deadline of Friday to comply, or face a legal claim for $1bn in the Florida courts.

The ultimatum was delivered as the BBC grappled with the fallout from the resignations on Sunday night of Mr Davie and Ms Turness, the chief executive in charge of news and current affairs.

Samir Shah, the BBC’s chairman, apologised for an “error of judgment” over the doctoring of Mr Trump’s speech in a letter to the culture, media and sport committee of MPs. But he insisted in a later interview that the corporation was not suffering from “systemic bias”.

Mr Shah said in his letter to MPs that there were no issues the BBC had sought to “bury”. However, he added that he was considering a personal apology to Mr Trump.

Meanwhile, BBC reporters suggested the whole affair could be part of a politically motivated boardroom plot. The Today programme presenter Nick Robinson said that sources inside the corporation had told him about “alleged political interference” after what they described as “a hostile takeover of parts of the BBC”.

A third senior executive – Jonathan Munro, the global director of BBC news who had previously argued that the Panorama edit of the Trump speech was “normal practice” – continued in post on Monday. In a show of defiance, he emailed staff to say that the “coming days and weeks will be hard” but “our work continues as normal”.

The fallout comes as Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, begins a “fundamental” review of the BBC’s Royal Charter, which is up for renewal at the end of 2027. The review will look at wholesale changes to the BBC’s governance and include alternatives to the licence fee, set to rise to £181 next year.

Mr Trump’s threat of legal action was contained in a four-page legal letter sent by one of his personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, direct to Mr Shah. The letter was sent on Sunday, almost a week after The Telegraph first revealed the selective editing of his infamous speech in Washington DC on Jan 6 2021.

The episode of Panorama, broadcast a week before the 2024 US election, “completely misled” viewers, according to a memo written by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the BBC.

The programme showed Mr Trump telling supporters he was going to walk to the Capitol with them to “fight like hell”, when in fact he said he would walk with them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.

A spokesman for Mr Trump’s legal team said: “The BBC defamed President Trump by intentionally and deceitfully editing its documentary in order to try and interfere in the presidential election. President Trump will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in lies, deception and fake news.”

In the letter, Mr Trump’s lawyers demanded that the misleading claims be taken down, along with an apology and appropriate compensation for the “harm caused”. The documentary was designed to “deliberately denigrate” him, the legal letter states.

“The timing of the fabricated documentary is evident,” the letter reads. “The BBC’s reckless disregard for the truth underscores the actual malice behind the decision to publish the wrongful content, given the plain falsity of the statements.”

Mr Trump’s lawyers gave the corporation until 5pm on Friday to take action. If the corporation failed to respond by then, “President Trump will be left with no alternative but to enforce his legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and are not waived, including by filing legal action for no less than $1bn in damages”.

The letter concludes: “The BBC is on notice.”

In June, the BBC launched a pilot paywall for US visitors to its website, promising to deliver trustworthy news. The legal action could put plans to charge people in the US for BBC content in jeopardy at a time when the broadcaster is seeking alternative revenue streams.

Announcing the project before her resignation, Ms Turness said: “Through our partnership with BBC Studios we are growing our audiences in North America – providing more people with news they can trust at a time of dramatic global uncertainty.”

The legal threat ratchets up the war of words being waged by the White House against the BBC. On Saturday, the White House condemned the corporation as a “Leftist propaganda machine”.

Hopes that the resignations of Mr Davie and Ms Turness would draw a line under the affair dissipated when Mr Trump took to Truth Social, his social media platform, to celebrate their resignations and praise The Telegraph’s reporting.

Mr Trump wrote: “Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these corrupt ‘journalists’. These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a presidential election.”

The statute of limitations for libel has expired in the UK for a Panorama programme. It stands at one year.

Mr Trump’s lawyers said they would bring the legal action in Florida, where the president’s primary residence is, and where plaintiffs have two years to launch their case.

Mr Trump has repeatedly used his legal muscle to push large news organisations into line.

Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, reached a $16m (£12.2m) settlement with Mr Trump in 2024 after he accused the broadcaster of deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.

ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit for $15m (£11.4m) in December after George Stephanopoulos, one of the broadcaster’s anchors, incorrectly claimed Mr Trump had been found liable for rape in a court case. In fact, a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.

On Monday night, former Question Time host David Dimbleby said errors with the Panorama programme should have been fixed sooner. He told Channel 4 News: “It should have been corrected at the time, and the editor of Panorama should have been fired, in my view, if he knew it was done. It’s ridiculous. 

“And to put the BBC in a position where President Trump can legitimately say, ‘liar BBC’ and use that as a stick to beat the BBC with, with all the work the BBC does all over the world... to get tripped up by something like this seems to me absurd.”

A YouGov poll published on Monday night found half of the public believed the BBC was biased, with 31 per cent saying it was too Left-wing and 19 per cent saying it was too Right-wing.

Meanwhile, 44 per cent of people said Mr Davie was right to resign compared with just 7 per cent who said he made the wrong decision.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]