BBC Pre-Edits Lecture Calling Trump ‘Most Openly Corrupt President’
from the most-openly-censorial-president dept
The BBC is now voluntarily suppressing criticism of Donald Trump before it airs—and the reason is obvious: Trump threatened to sue them into oblivion, and they blinked.
Historian Rutger Bregman revealed this week that the BBC commissioned a public lecture from him last month, recorded it, then quietly cut a single sentence before broadcast. The deleted line? Calling Trump “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” Bregman posted about the capitulation, noting that the decision came from “the highest levels” of the BBC—meaning the executives dealing with Trump’s threats.
Well, at least we should call out Donald Trump as the most openly censorial president in American history.
This is the payoff from Trump’s censorship campaign against the BBC. Weeks ago, Trump threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars over an edit in a program it aired a year ago. The BBC apologized and fired employees associated with the project. That wasn’t enough. Trump’s FCC censorship lackey Brendan Carr launched a bullshit investigation anyway. And now the BBC is preemptively editing out true statements that might anger the thin-skinned man baby President.
Bregman posted the exact line that got cut. Here’s the full paragraph, with the censored sentence in bold:
On one side we had an establishment propping up an elderly man in obvious mental decline. On the other we had a convicted reality star who now rules as the most openly corrupt president in American history. When it comes to staffing his administration, he is a modern day Caligula, the Roman emperor who wanted to make his horse a consul. He surrounds himself with loyalists, grifters, and sycophants.
Gosh, for what reason would the BBC cut that one particular line?
The BBC admitted to this in the most mealy-mouthed way when asked by the New Republic to comment on the situation:
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.”
“On legal advice.” Translation: Trump’s SLAPP suit threats worked exactly as intended.
Greg Sargent, writing in the New Republic, nails why this matters:
There is something deeply perverse in this outcome. Even if you grant Trump’s criticism of the edit of his January 6 speech—never mind that as the violence raged, Trump essentially sat on his hands for hours and arguably directed the mob to target his vice president—the answer to this can’t be to let Trump bully truth-telling into self-censoring silence.
That’s plainly what happened here.
Exactly. The BBC’s initial capitulation—the apology, the firings, the groveling—was bad enough. But this is worse. This is pre-censorship. The BBC is now editing out true statements about Trump before they air, purely because they’re afraid of how he might react. That’s not “legal advice.” That’s cowardice institutionalized as policy.
Once again, I remind you that Trump’s supporters have, for years, insisted that he was “the free speech president” and have talked about academic freedom and the right to state uncomfortable ideas.
Yet, do we hear any of them complaining about this obvious suppression of speech following a clear and censorial threat from the president? Of course not. Will the media continue to pretend that Donald Trump supports free speech, even as he’s the most openly censorial president in history? Of course.
It would be nice if more people would at least acknowledge what a farce all of this is. And it would also be nice if the BBC didn’t so quickly cave to such bogus threats.
And where are all those self-proclaimed free speech warriors now? The ones who spent years screaming about “cancel culture” and “academic freedom”?
Silent, of course. Because it was never about principles. It was about whose speech gets protected. Trump can threaten to bankrupt a media organization for accurately describing his role in an insurrection, and the same people who lose their minds over a college speaker getting heckled will find a way to justify it or simply look away.
The media will continue this charade too. They’ll keep treating Trump’s “free speech” posturing as if it’s sincere, even as he openly threatens journalists, demands the imprisonment of critics, and bullies foreign and domestic media organizations into self-censorship. We’re watching the most openly censorial president in American history deploy the legal system as a weapon against truthful speech, and the political press mostly covers it as just another controversy, not the authoritarian playbook it actually is.
The BBC made a choice here. Not a good one, not a legally required one, but a choice. They decided that avoiding Trump’s wrath was more important than telling the truth. That calculation might make sense in the short term—legal bills are expensive, and Trump’s vindictiveness is well-documented. But in the long term, this is how authoritarians win. Not by directly seizing control of the press, but by making media organizations internalize the censor, editing themselves before the threats even arrive.
Every institution that caves makes the next capitulation easier. Every truth that gets preemptively deleted because it might anger Trump makes it clearer that speaking truth about Trump comes with consequences that institutions increasingly won’t risk. This is the test, and the BBC is failing it.
Filed Under: censorship, chilling effects, corruption, donald trump, free speech, rutger bregman, slapp suits
Companies: bbc
Comments on “BBC Pre-Edits Lecture Calling Trump ‘Most Openly Corrupt President’”
Trump… proving Bregman’s point.
“The most openly corrupt president in American history”? I’m sure Trump would be glad to receive such a compliment.
He’s always so proud to the best the first President of something, and he’s trying so hard to be the first President to suck that much, that he’s willing to see that as even more encouragements.
But it’s not clear that the statement is the truth. It feels true to me; but it’s a fairly specific comparison to 44 other presidents, most of whose terms and controversies I don’t know in detail.
Granted, “openly” and “corrupt” are both subjective terms, but, then, doesn’t that just mean they’re best avoided when intending to present “truth”? I mean, it’s basically an opinion disguised as a fact, which since we’re talking about being “mealy-mouthed” seems to be exactly that. Don’t just say Trump is corrupt, taking a “view from nowhere”, but take some responsibility for having and expressing that opinion. Or go the other way, and define the terms well enough that fact-checkers can review them.
I think Trump’s an openly corrupt asshole. More corrupt that Nixon, because Nixon at least had the good sense to resign when caught ignoring laws in relation to the Watergate scandal. More open, because Nixon tried to cover that shit up and pretended to be uninvolved, whereas Trump went on TV to brag about shipping immigrants off to hellholes after courts had ordered this exact administration to refrain from doing exactly that.
Still, those are my opinions—I know, slightly ironic when posting anonymously—and I’m not gonna pretend they’re anything else. I’m not gonna implicitly compare against, say, Pierce, because I know too little about that time period. I’m not gonna say some shit like “most people believe” or “as everyone knows”, because those are statements I can’t back up.
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Blah blahblah how nuanced. i read with complete awe.
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My only objection would be, there were some doozies in the late 19th C, can we have a compare-and-contrast to the worst of those to really confirm that Trump is the rock bottom of the whole nasty pile?
Speaking of that, I just watched Death by Lightning on Netflix. Highly recommended! One of the highlights is Nick Offerman as Chester A. Arthur, who begin his political career as a New York street thug who apparently really did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue or the equivalent. Makes you realize that maybe Trump isn’t such an outlier after all.
Pathetic
I distinctly remember seeing several comments in previous articles about the BBC talking about how while they might have folded and grovelled at Trump’s feet in response to his initial threat they’d absolutely stand up to him in court, but given how they’re still grovelling and trying to appease him at this point I fully expect that they’ll cave on that too and hand him a hefty pile of ‘Please go away’ money in yet another attempt to avert his petulant wrath.
Still, nice of the BBC to admit on the global stage that they cannot and should not be trusted to honestly report on US news, or really any news involving anyone that might be inclined to sue them.
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For all my own criticisms of American media being horrible brown nosing cunts who love to suck up to power, there is a strong American tradition of standing up to The Man when he comes and threatens you.
The UK press’s culture is very sycophantic to power, very connected, and is terrified of doing anything that may be too disruptive or embarrassing the British “establishment” (I am loathe to use that word but I can’t think of a better one.) I have never doubted for even a moment that the BBC would go grovelling to the Don.
If anything, I’m far more surprised that US media outlets chose to settle with Trump than I am to see that the BBC is bending the knee like this. Not to say that American media does not have its own issues with power, it does, but is is trillions of times worse in His Majesty’s United Kingdom.
Why choose to be spineless? Everyone who actually stands up the Fanta Dr. Evil succeeds at it. Before you say “defending yourself in court costs money”: 1. This is the BBC. They have money. 2. You don’t exactly need to dish out for a legal defense that comes down to “lol no”.
Re: 'You folded like wet cardboard yesterday but TODAY I should trust you?'
It’s even dumber than that because while settling may be cheaper in the short-term it also flags them as a piggy-bank for Trump to smack around any time he wants more money, and rather more importantly folding sacrifices the priceless business commodity that is reputation.
By folding so publicly and in such a pathetic fashion they’ve ensured that no-one who’s paying attention will trust anything they say regarding Trump or the regime going forward, and for a news agency people believing what you say and watching is kinda an important part of the job.
I’m not sure why the BBC is even bothering to respond.
Trump can’t sue for libel or defamation in the UK because the time limit has passed to take action.
The BBC as an entity does not exist in the USA, so they are not subject to any US law. They can just ignore any ruling a US court makes.
I’d be telling trump to go fuck himself if I were them.
Censoring someone for saying Trump is corrupt is like censoring someone for saying water is wet.
But the BBC has a reputation for only critiquing the easily-targeted, never the well-entrenched favourites of milord. It’s rapidly becoming known as the Daily Mail of news corporations.