Trump's $10 Billion BBC Lawsuit Has More Flaws Than His Other Media Attacks

The Legal Battle Between Donald Trump and the BBC

Up until this year, it was unheard of for a sitting American president to sue a news outlet. However, in just a few months, President Donald Trump has managed to make it seem normal. Trump has sued The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and now the BBC, each time filing suit in Florida and each time alleging defamation.

Numerous legal experts have expressed that the underlying complaints are weak — and that the publicity may be the real point. The newest suit, lodged against the BBC this week, charges that a bad edit to a pre-election film was a defamatory attempt to influence American voters, even though the film did not air in the US.

“This is nothing more than the president’s latest effort to intimidate media companies that he sees as adversarial to his administration,” said Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The pattern is evident: Trump immediately wins headlines for waging a legal battle, making him look like he’s taking bold action to combat media misdeeds, and leaving some of his fans rooting for a multibillion-dollar judgment that will wound a perceived opponent. And then media lawyers review the complaint and poke lots of holes in it.

Dylan McLemore, who studies media law and teaches at the University of Oklahoma, told DISCOVERTREND, “The decision to file in Florida goes back to the question at the heart of all of the president’s defamation suits against media companies — is he filing them to win in court or to create headlines and chill critical speech from the press?”

McLemore and several other media law experts expressed skepticism about the suit against the BBC, even though the British broadcaster has already admitted to an erroneous edit and apologized for it.

“An apology is not an admission of guilt,” McLemore said. “In fact, in defamation cases, the defendant can actually argue that the public apology reduces harm to the plaintiff.”

The ‘Bad Edit’ in Question

The case involves an October 2024 broadcast of the BBC documentary series “Panorama.” An episode about Trump’s reelection campaign spliced together two different parts of Trump’s infamous January 6, 2021, speech to make it sound like he told the crowd he would walk with them to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”

In the actual speech, his exhortations to “fight” were separate from his suggestion about walking to the Capitol to “cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”

The BBC program should have made the edit obvious to viewers, perhaps with a white flash effect, a common editing technique. But the bad edit did not draw attention at the time the documentary premiered on television. It was only publicized this fall when a former BBC adviser’s memo about editorial shortcomings was leaked to a British newspaper.

Trump and his allies have used the bad edit to put political pressure on the BBC and to dispute Trump’s key role inciting the January 6 insurrection.

However, the BBC “multiple US judges have noted President Trump’s repeated exhortations to ‘fight’ and ‘stop the steal’ as central to the riot’s occurrence,” the London-based media lawyer Mark Stephens said in an email message.

Those expressions, “combined with urging supporters to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue (albeit peacefully), could be interpreted as directed at inciting imminent lawless action.” And that is, “in essence,” what the BBC conveyed in the documentary, Stephens said. “Indeed, US judges have already made those characterizations in many suits.”

The BBC said Tuesday that it will defend itself against Trump’s lawsuit.

The free expression group PEN America called the suit “a coercive ploy to globalize his domestic threats to a free and independent press and to chill reporting overseas.”

High Bar for Proving Actual Malice

“The headline on the legal analysis in all of these suits has to be how extraordinarily protective the First Amendment is of news outlets in libel cases involving public figures,” University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones told DISCOVERTREND.

In the BBC case, “many have noted that this editing fell short of excellent journalism — indeed, the BBC itself has conceded this, and the Trump complaint emphasizes the internal and external critiques the BBC has faced. These are bad facts,” she said.

But the BBC’s apology doesn’t matter in a court of law: “Trump must show knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth,” Jones said.

And “the bar to prove actual malice in news editing is remarkably high,” McLemore added.

Both professors predicted a legal fight over Trump’s decision to file suit in Florida.

According to the BBC, it did not televise or stream the documentary in the US. Trump’s complaint suggests that some Floridians streamed the UK broadcast using a virtual private network, though it doesn’t cite any specific examples of anyone doing so.

“Whether and how actual Floridians were impacted by this documentary is going to be a real centerpiece of the action,” Andersen Jones said.

The BBC will likely move to have the case thrown out right away on jurisdictional grounds.

The venue matters too because the lawsuit claims $10 billion in damages, which is “a hard number to sustain in any libel suit,” Andersen Jones added. “It is a ridiculously hard number to sustain without a strong showing that there was an actual viewing audience. The fight over this will be important.”

Trump often welcomes fights with major media outlets, though recent history shows that when defendants choose to litigate rather than settle with him, courts tend to side with the First Amendment.

The International Press Institute said Tuesday that the BBC lawsuit “is plainly disproportionate, and its excessively punitive nature is in line with Trump’s attempts to target news organizations — including outlets beyond U.S. borders — that report critically on the administration.”

Scott Griffen, the executive director of the institute, asserted that the lawsuit is “intended as a warning to media outlets around the world.”