There may well be another way for a media outlet to bring on a veritable fusillade of media attacks on itself -- not to mention a potential lawsuit by a President -- but apparently the British Broadcasting Corporation has won the contest going away.
The British network mangled a soundbite about President Trump’s speech of January 6th of 2021.
Now, the story of Trump’s latest moves in this story is all over, but here is America’s NBC News headlining this of the BBC edit story:
Trump threatens legal action, BBC apologizes for speech edit after top execs quit
A BBC spokesperson said Monday it would "respond directly in due course" after the president sent a letter threatening to seek $1 billion in damages from Britain's public broadcaster.
This story was followed by another Trump headline:
Trump says he has an 'obligation' to sue the BBC over edited Jan. 6 speech
Asked whether he would sue, the president told Fox News on Tuesday night: "Well, I guess I have to you know, why not?”
That NBC story reports:
In it, two parts of the (Trump) speech were edited together to give the impression that Trump said: 'We're going to walk down to the Capitol... and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.'
In fact Trump initially said: 'We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.'
He said later: "And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”
Which is to say the BBC ran a description of what the President actually said in that January 6th speech that was not accurate. And as a result, according to news reports like the one above, Trump is now preparing to sue the English pants off the network.
Back in the US, Newsmax’s founder and CEO Christopher Ruddy (and full disclosure I am a Newsmax contributor) has congratulated President Trump on the subject of the BBC, with Newsmax headlining the story:
Ruddy: President Trump, Thank You For Your BBC Fight
In his letter Ruddy says this:
For decades, the British Broadcasting Corporation — the BBC — was regarded as the gold standard of international journalism. Its calm tone, rigorous standards, and aversion to partisanship made it a model for broadcasters worldwide.
But that reputation has been tarnished in recent years as even the BBC has succumbed to the same disease infecting so much of the global media: leftwing political bias.
Now, the BBC may be facing one of the biggest reckonings in its storied history.
President Donald J. Trump is preparing a defamation lawsuit against the network, and this time, it's not a stunt.
The BBC made a major — and potentially catastrophic — mistake when it aired an edited clip of Trump's January 6, 2021, speech that completely distorted his words and intent.”
Exactly.
And a “stunt” is decidedly not what Trump is about.
The real question here is how in the world could a seriously professional news organization like the BBC get itself into this situation in the first place?
And the answer is as easy as it is obvious.
As with so many supposed “professional” and “non-partisan” journalists in America, the BBC obviously has its share of left-wing, Trump-despising partisans masquerading as professional journalists.
To say the least, this is a serious problem in today’s journalism, both across the pond and right here in America as well. It is, in fact, an outgrowth of the very long history of supposed “non-partisan” journalists being, in fact, decidedly serious partisans of the Left.
There is a reason that in today’s world news outlets from Newsmax to Fox News to so many conservative others, both in print and broadcast form, exist in the first place.
And that reason is simply that as more and more Americans of the long ago began to wake up to the fact that the nation’s major newspapers and television news outlets - The New York Times, Washington Post and the major television broadcast networks of the day (among others) were decidedly not straight “just the facts” journalism as they were advertised to be.
Those who came of age in the early 1960’s well remember CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, the icon of supposed straight-from-the-shoulder just-the-facts journalism, closing his nightly newscasts by looking straight into the camera at the end of every broadcast and saying: “And that’s the way it is.” The Times advertised itself as daily printing "All the News That's Fit to Print” while The Post goes with “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
In fact, the news as presented by the national news media was - and is! - all too frequently and decidedly “not the way it is.” And as Chris Ruddy says, today’s media is all too obviously filled with “leftwing political bias.”
The media of Cronkite’s day, to give just two examples, tried to say:
- That the GOP’s 1964 presidential nominee, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, was both a racist and a right-wing extremist. Neither was true.
- That President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated because Dallas was the citadel of a far right-wing cabal of conservatives. (His actual assassin was the vividly on-the-record “fair play for Cuba” pro-Communist Lee Harvey Oswald.)
This pattern had already been noticed in the early 1950’s, leading a young, aspiring journalist named William F. Buckley Jr. to create, in 1955, America’s first, highly successful conservative magazine National Review.
Buckley, in 1951, had already authored God and Man at Yale, a decided critique of his left-leaning alma mater that tried to portray Yale academia as strictly non-partisan when it was anything but. From roughly then on the conservative movement’s voice in the media grew ever louder, eventually resulting in the creation of all manner of outlets from today’s Fox News to Newsmax to News Nation to the Media Research Center (home of NewsBusters). And, but of course, there was Rush Limbaugh’s invention of conservative talk radio, a decidedly huge industry today.
So. Here we are today, with, per example, this Associated Press headline in Fortune:
Trump nails BBC on similar tape-editing claim that led to controversial ’60 Minutes’ settlement as news chief, director-general resign
The AP story reports:
Britain’s BBC is reeling this week following the resignations of its director-general, Tim Davie, and news chief Deborah Turness amid accusations of bias in the editing of last year’s documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance.” The BBC admitted filmmakers spliced together quotes from different sections of the speech Trump made before the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol to make it seem like he was directly urging violence.
Given the attitude of far Left-wing politics underlying the media, whether in the UK or the U.S., none of this should be a surprise.
What is new -- largely thanks to Trump -- is the willingness of a major U.S. political figure to fight back against media bias with more than a critical press release.
Will Trump’s taking on the BBC set some sort of a pattern of caution down the media road for theoretically non-partisan outlets to actually live up to their self-appointed image as non-partisan “just the facts” journalism?
Who knows? But the very fact that Trump has set this type of response in motion by legally taking on the BBC with his potential BBC lawsuit is something new.
Stay tuned.
