You may not always love Donald Trump, but he deserves applause for his tenacity in pursuing the disgraceful BBC rot

As a Floridian, I’ll be watching with bated breath as the BBC, which the British public is forced to fund, is hauled into a court in my own state to answer for a shameful deceit: doctoring a US president’s speech and making him say words he never spoke.

On October 28, 2024, a week before the American election, BBC Panorama spliced two passages of the President’s January 6, 2021 speech, 55 minutes apart, into a statement he never made.

The BBC admitted the broadcast had given “the mistaken impression that Trump made a direct call for violent action.”

On November 10, 2026, in a 40-page ruling, Judge Jeffrey T. Kuntz, a Trump appointee in Florida, refused to dismiss the defamation claim.

He wrote that the BBC "had edited a video to make it appear as though President Trump made a statement he never made," and that this was "not trimming around the edges but creating something different from what was stated in the speech."

The claims, and any damages, remain to be proved.

The BBC’s job is to report the news, not to fashion a version of it that serves as a political agenda.

Impartiality is the charter it is paid to honour, and it treated that duty as optional.

A broadcaster the British public is forced to fund doctored a US president’s words and presented them to its audience as the real thing.

That is a contemptible breach of trust from a national broadcaster.

This is not a loyalty test for Donald Trump.

Those who cannot stand the man are still entitled to a broadcaster that does not deceive the people who pay for it, and the politics of the target do not excuse the deceit.

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A public broadcaster that will doctor for a president’s speech to suit its own politics has forfeited the right to be taken at its word.

The bias on display was not a question of tone or a clumsy cut.

Words spoken nearly an hour apart were joined so that a president appeared to say what he had not said, and the film went out a week before the vote.

That is a newsroom that has been captured by ideology and is no longer bound to the truth.

The people who made that edit were not serving the viewers who paid their wages.

They were serving their own politics.

For a corporation that spends its time instructing the country in what is decent and what is true, the hypocrisy is staggering.

The BBC still presents itself as a model of impartiality.

It cannot go on doing so while stitching together a statement a US president never made and still asking the public to fund it.

If it will do this to the President of the United States, the claim that it can be trusted with British politics is hollow.

Those same instincts have convinced so many licence-fee payers that the corporation is no longer on their side and has not been for a long time.

Worse still, the bill goes to the British public.

A national broadcaster funded by a compulsory licence fee has no business acting as a partisan mouthpiece, and those who pay it should not fund the legal defence of an edit the BBC has itself admitted was misleading.

The scandal is the doctoring of a president’s words, not a payout to the man himself.

A name that once meant something in broadcasting, and was meant to stand for the country itself, is now in the hands of people with little regard for truth or integrity.

It has been captured by extreme progressives, and it has come to stand for something larger than one broadcaster: the decline of institutions the country once trusted.

Those in charge have wrecked that reputation.

The BBC has stopped reporting the news and become the story.

Until that bias is driven out, nothing it puts on air can be taken on trust.

Trump has had the tenacity to drag an activist BBC into a courtroom, and that is worth a word of gratitude.

He is right to pursue this.

The BBC should be made to answer, and if the cost of that reckoning is severe, that is a consequence of its own conduct.

The people running on the BBC have wrecked a name that was meant to stand for the country.

They will now have to answer that in a court in my own state, and they have only themselves to thank.