The BBC has apologised to President Donald Trump after an episode of Panorama which aired last year misleadingly spliced together two parts of a speech that Trump gave on the day of the January 6th Capitol riots. But for the US president, an apology is not enough. Trump is now threatening to sue the BBC for between one and five billion dollars, a figure which could cripple the broadcaster.
The BBC undoubtedly erred with this broadcast, combining excerpts in a way that implied he had directly incited violence. The programme portrayed him saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell”. In fact, Trump said “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” only adding the exhortation to “fight like hell” 50 minutes later.[1] Even though many analysts and academics think that Trump’s rhetoric did encourage violence that day, even if only tacitly, the edited segment was still a misleading way to present that specific speech.[2]
Trump and the media
Trump’s threat to sue the BBC fits a broader pattern in which the US president uses financial threats and public pressure campaigns to attempt to cow media outlets who carry messages that he dislikes. In the past year, he has sued a range of media outlets for defamation – claiming that they knowingly lied about him in order to hurt his reputation. His targets have included TV companies such as ABC News and CNN, and newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Iowa-based Des Moines Register.
Trump’s hostility to the media is long standing. Shortly after he was elected in 2016, he referred to the media as “the enemy of the people”.[3] According to Trump, many forms of mass media are systematically biased against him because they are staffed by people he considers to hold liberal political views. Because he views large sections of the media as engaged in an unjust campaign against him, he and his supporters see retaliation efforts to push back against critical media coverage as legitimate. Hence, Trump has used not only these lawsuits but also various instruments of state power to attempt to punish or marginalise professionally run media outlets. For instance, he has downgraded the status of traditional media in White House briefings, inviting friendly podcasters and social media influencers to ask questions instead.[4]
The favourable treatment that Trump has shown towards right-wing media – especially Fox News, the flagship outlet of conservative news – shows that it is not media per se that he objects to. Rather, he objects to media outlets that give him negative coverage – and he is willing to use the tools at his disposal to punish such coverage. Such steps not only please many of his supporters, who likewise see large parts of the media as an enemy which does not represent their values. It also serves to have a chilling effect on other journalists. Be careful how you cover Trump, the message is – or you might find yourself facing a $5bn lawsuit.
And that is exactly where the BBC now finds itself.
Unlikely to succeed
One curious aspect of Trump’s lawsuits against media outlets is that, legally at least, they rest on extremely shaky ground. Their intent should hence be understood as political – and on those terms, they can be much more successful.
The legal vehicle that Trump has used in previous lawsuits, and which he wants now to wield against the BBC, is defamation. The modern framework of defamation law in the United States was created in 1964 by a Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a case in which Southern segregationists sued The New York Times for printing what it said were defamatory lies by supporters of civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr.
In the case, the Supreme Court established an extremely high bar for any official holding public office to win a defamation case against a media outlet. The court declared – unanimously – that winning such a case must involve showing that untrue statements were made with “actual malice” or “reckless disregard”. Put differently, that means that the claimant must prove that the media outlet knew the statement was false or at least had serious doubts about its accuracy. Furthermore, officials bringing defamation cases have to prove that the statement is false, rather than placing the burden of proof on the defendant.
This legal precedent is commonly understood as making it extremely difficult for public officials to win defamation cases – which was the entire point behind the Supreme Court’s ruling. The court reasoned that robust public debate must involve strong protections for media outlets criticising public officials, and they created them accordingly. No US president has ever brought a defamation lawsuit against a media outlet in the modern era, partly because they knew they would be likely to lose. Trump is likely to lose too.
There are other reasons why Trump would likely find the case against the BBC difficult to win. Defamation cases hinge on whether or not untrue statements cause damages – emotional, financial, or in some other category. Trump would presumably argue that the Panorama documentary harmed his political career, but that is difficult to prove. Firstly, the episode never even aired in the United States, and he has no political career in Britain. Secondly, Trump went on to win re-election as President of the United States just over a week after it aired, suggesting that any damage to his reputation was not particularly grave. Thirdly, Trump and lawyers seem to not even have noticed that the documentary existed until British media brought it to light just a few weeks ago.
Trump might argue that he suffered commercial damages, but this again would be difficult to prove. He remains an incredibly wealthy man and continues to strike business deals all over the world. Any damage to his UK business interests cannot have been particularly severe if he did not even notice it at the time.
This is why most legal observers consider that Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC is unlikely to succeed in court.[5] But that may not be the point.
Victory of another kind
Despite the difficulties of winning a defamation case, Trump has already shown how such cases can result in a positive outcome for him. When he sued ABC News over a defamatory statement allegedly made by anchor George Stephanoupolus, the legal consensus was that the case would be very difficult to win. But ABC News never even let the case get to court, instead admitting fault and settling for $15m.[6]
The reason for ABC to do this was simple: it avoided becoming embroiled in a lengthy court battle that could suck up the network’s time and resources and perhaps harm the business interests of its parent company, Disney. The settlement also allowed the network to get into the good graces of the Trump administration, which has other regulatory tools that it can use to harm the interests of US-based media outlets.
In the ABC News case, making a legally dubious claim worked to Trump’s advantage because it boxed his adversary into a political corner. But not every case has worked out this way. The New York Times, for instance, has fought back against Trump’s defamation allegations, the first version of which was subsequently dismissed by the court. Since then, Trump has refiled a new claim, and the NYT plans to fight that too.[7] Even though Trump looks unlikely to get a settlement from the NYT, he still likely relishes his ability to suck its time and resources into a distracting court battle.
These tactics suggest that Trump does not actually need to win his court cases for them to damage media organisations and have a chilling effect on media freedom. This brings us back to the BBC.
So far, the BBC insists that it will not reach a settlement with Trump. This is understandable – after all, Trump is unlikely to win the case in court, and any settlement would essentially be paid with British taxpayers’ money. But the episode can still do the broadcaster considerable damage. Firstly, it makes it vulnerable to political criticism at home, aiding a long-running campaign by its commercial rivals to undercut its influence. Secondly, the heightened scrutiny means that the BBC will have to be much more careful in how it presents controversial topics, particularly relating to Trump, which is likely to make it more cautious in its coverage.
Nor is the damage likely to be limited to the BBC. Trump’s extraordinary decision to sue a foreign broadcaster serves as another example of the lengths to which he is willing to go to quash speech that he dislikes. By breaking previous norms of presidential behaviour, Trump constantly keeps media outlets guessing about what he might do next. The result is a chilling effect on press freedom, even if Trump never has a successful day in court.
Andrew Gawthorpe is an FPC Research Fellow and expert on US politics and foreign policy at Leiden University in The Netherlands and the creator of the newsletter America Explained. He was formerly a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a teaching fellow at the UK Defence Academy, and a civil servant in the Cabinet Office.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the individual author and do not reflect the views of The Foreign Policy Centre.
[1] Noor Nanji, BBC Apologises to Trump Over Panorama Edit but Refuses to pay Compensation, BBC News, November 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c874nw4g2zzo.
[2] Capitol Riots: Did Trump’s Words at Rally Incite Violence?, BBC News, February 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55640437 ; Evangelos Ntonis et al., A Warrant for Violence? An Analysis of Donald Trump’s Speech before the US Capitol Attack, British Journal of Social Psychology (2023), https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjso.12679.
[3] Marvin Kalb, Enemy of the People: Trump’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy. Brookings Institution Press, 2018.
[4] Liam Scott, White House to Open Media Access to Podcasters, Influencers, Voice of America, January 2025, https://www.voanews.com/a/white-house-to-open-media-access-to-podcasters-influencers/7953761.html.
[5] Rebecca Moosavian, Trump v the BBC: A Legal Expert Explains how the Case Could Play Out, The Conversation, November 2025, https://theconversation.com/trump-v-the-bbc-a-legal-expert-explains-how-the-case-could-play-out-269551.
[6] Michael R. Sisak, ABC Agrees to Give $15 Million to Donald Trump’s Presidential Library to Settle Defamation Lawsuit, Associated Press, December 2024, https://apnews.com/article/abc-trump-lawsuit-defamation-stephanopoulos-04aea8663310af39ae2a85f4c1a56d68.
[7] Jenna Amatulli and George Chidi, Trump Files Amended $15bn Defamation Complaint against New York Times, The Guardian, October 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/trump-new-york-times-defamation-complaint.