The BBC chairman Samir Shah perhaps summed it up in the interview he gave me the day after the director general and the CEO of News resigned. He called the president “a litigious fellow”.
That’s an understatement, evident in the number of legal cases Trump has taken out against various US media companies.
The president, based on his GB News interview, is clearly hurt by what he sees as an “egregious” edit, and he has now apparently upped the amount he says he will sue the corporation for.
While on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump told reporters the figure would be “anywhere between $1bn [£759m] and $5bn”.
To put this in context, the BBC’s annual income from the licence fee was £3.8 billion last year.
On Friday, Trump said: “They changed the words coming out of my mouth.” He wants to know why Panorama edited two clips of his speech together to give a “totally different meaning”.
He doesn’t accept the BBC’s response that what happened was unintentional.
This is a very serious moment in the history of the BBC. It stands or falls by being viewed as impartial – a source to trust in a world where trust in institutions is falling.
Instead, the corporation is being accused of the opposite – and faces an expensive and very public battle with the most powerful man in the world.
So where does it go from here?
Ever since the president first threatened legal action, it was clear that the corporation did not intend to offer him compensation. It believes it has a case that, whatever error was made, no harm was caused to Trump by the Panorama programme.
He was elected President soon after it went out and anyway, says the BBC, the programme wasn’t broadcast on any US channels, so how could it have harmed him?
I think there was a certain consensus, inside and outside the corporation, that the notion of using licence fee payers’ money to settle with Trump was a non-starter.
As one former senior BBC executive put it to me, after the BBC had rejected offering compensation, “they’ve made the right call”. But this person also said, if the president did decide to sue, the BBC would have to “baton down – and get the best lawyers in Florida”.
The reason to settle would have been to bring down costs in the long run.
Now it looks as if the BBC will be involved in a protracted, costly court battle at a time when it should be 100% focussed on the discussions over the renewal of its charter, which are ramping up.
The people at the top of the BBC should be fully concentrating on what is, in normal times, a fundamental moment for the corporation – when what it’s for, its scope, how it will be funded, the details of its very existence are all hammered out between government and BBC in time for a new charter at the start of 2028.
It’s already losing the man who should have led that – Tim Davie, the Director General.
Now top BBC brains will be diverted, to game out its next moves in what could be a very damaging, even existential fight with Donald Trump. The legal fees alone could get very expensive.
This might all have been avoided if the BBC had been open about the error much earlier and corrected it. Instead, it faces a long road.
But there may be routes off it.
Might the BBC ask the UK government to step in through back channels? Would a call from Prime Minister Keir Starmer persuade Trump to change his mind? Would Starmer even want to get involved and expend his own political capital with the US president?
One positive for the BBC this week was the robust nature in which the culture secretary Lisa Nandy defended the corporation.
She talked about the widespread trust in BBC News and described the corporation as “a light on the hill for people in times of darkness” which brings the country together, whether through Celebrity Traitors or its VE Day coverage.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has called the BBC “worse than fake news”. He claims the corporation and its journalists are corrupt.
The fight is well and truly on.
Source: www.bbc.com