Now that President Donald Trump has launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against the BBC—accusing the broadcaster of splicing two sections of his January 6, 2021 speech to make it appear more incendiary than it actually was—perhaps it’s worth explaining a bit about how the Corporation operates.
One of the most bizarre things about the BBC is that it is funded by a tax on every TV set, known as the “license fee.” Long familiarity has habituated Brits to this absurdity, which dates back to the early twentieth century when the BBC was the only broadcaster in the country.
Imagine if there were an annual $230 tax on every machine capable of playing music—your car stereo, your smartphone, your hidden speakers—with the revenue going to a single state-backed record label. Or imagine a tax on every newspaper sold… and, hang on, you actually did have one of those. It was called the Stamp Act, and as far as I recall, it went down badly.
Being state-funded, the BBC is subject to various public service broadcasting regulations, one of which is that it must remain politically impartial. When it comes to straightforward British party politics, the BBC generally meets this obligation, following clear rules on allocating each party proportionate airtime, offering politicians a right of reply, and so on.
However, as soon as it moves into the cultural space, any pretense of neutrality tends to disappear, and the BBC’s soft-left biases come to the fore: immigrants good, Israelis bad, trans good, guns bad. Naturally, as an organization funded by public money, it tends to see politicians who favor higher government spending as compassionate, and those who oppose it as mean—an attitude that goes a long way to explaining the fiscal mess Britain is currently in.
Many of these structural biases were highlighted in a leaked internal memo earlier this month, which sparked the letter from Trump’s law firm. The editing of his speech was only a minor part of the report.
The memo also detailed how US election coverage had been slanted toward the Democrats—not by giving them more airtime directly, but through focusing on their issues (such as abortion rather than immigration or the economy) and using their language (like “reproductive rights”).
The report pointed out persistently slanted reporting on race issues in Britain as well: a false claim that there was an “ethnic premium” on car insurance, for example, and a tendentious story about minorities having more insecure jobs.
What was perhaps most striking, though, was the bellicose manner in which the BBC reported on the Gaza conflict, uncritically repeating Hamas propaganda claims, and even airing a clip about life in the Gaza Strip by the son of a Hamas minister.
Any doubt about the BBC’s partiality has been removed by the reaction to this report. Conservatives have called for root-and-branch reforms to ensure objectivity, or else for scrapping the license fee altogether. A commercially funded BBC, they argue, could be as one-sided as it pleased—and it would be no one’s business but its viewers.
Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians, by contrast, have lined up to defend what they insist is a completely impartial broadcaster. QED, you might say. The last thing Britain’s Labour administration will do is weaken an organization that promotes its worldview.
Trump’s lawsuit may actually help the BBC. Just as we criticize our own countries or families but bristle when outsiders do the same, many British people will resent what they see as bullying from overseas, dismissing Trump’s claim as bombastic and unfounded.
Given that Trump won the presidency, and that he has since spoken warmly in favor of the January 6 rioters, it is quite a stretch to argue that he has suffered a billion dollars’ worth of damage. Yet that is his lawyers’ assertion: “Due to their salacious nature, the fabricated statements that were aired by the BBC have been widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums, which have reached tens of millions of people worldwide.”
Unless “salacious” has a different meaning in Florida, that strikes me as quite the claim.
Even so, the BBC has been fatally weakened. It is unlikely to survive a change of government.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-columnists/3886863/trump-vs-the-bbc/