Another institution prostrates itself at the feet of Donald Trump:
Earlier this month, you may recall, President Donald Trump angrily threatened to sue the British Broadcasting Corporation for $1 billion over its use of footage of his speech just before the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Unlike Trump’s other lawsuits against media companies, this threat wasn’t entirely baseless: The BBC ended up admitting that its edit of the footage did misleadingly create the “impression of a direct call for action,” and several executives resigned, citing a need to be “transparent” about what had happened. Trump celebrated their ouster.
Now the BBC has overcorrected—albeit in the other direction. On Bluesky, historian Rutger Bregman just charged that the broadcaster cut a line from a BBC lecture he delivered, in which he described Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.”
Is it really now beyond the pale for the BBC to air an accurate description of Trump’s open and explicit corruption and to correctly situate it in the American historical context? The answer, unfortunately, appears to be yes.
Asked for comment on Bregman’s charge, a spokesperson for the BBC emailed me this: “All of our programmes are required to comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, and we made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice.
He threatened them with a billion dollar lawsuit, they apologized and now they’re self-censoring.
The media is killing itself.