US President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit for 10 billion dollars in damages against the BBC. He accuses the British broadcaster of editing a documentary about the storming of the Capitol to portray him in a false and malicious way. The BBC has announced that it intends to defend itself.
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The US president will fail here
The Süddeutsche Zeitung sees the BBC on the right track:
“This British institution has apologised for technical errors in a report about Trump and his supporters’ storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and rightly so. … But words were not put in his mouth, as he claims. The editing merely had a slightly distorting effect. This is easy to prove. Trump continues to deny his election defeat in 2020 to this day. … Publicly funded, the world’s largest radio and television broadcaster has no reason to go along with Trump’s rewriting of history or his campaign against press freedom. His lawsuits against two critics were recently dismissed. His grotesque attack on the BBC will also fail.”
Legal intimidation as a political tool
Trump is following a familiar pattern with this lawsuit, says the Irish Independent:
“The first element is intimidation: enormous damage claims are less about winning than about chilling journalists. The second is framing: portraying the BBC as politically motivated, recasting a newsroom as an adversary in a partisan arena. The third is strategic litigation: choosing a US jurisdiction where political winds may blow more favourably, while the UK defamation deadline has long expired. … Under what conditions can independent journalism still function when legal intimidation becomes a standard political tool?”
A lose-lose situation
The Guardian examines whether a settlement might be the more sensible option:
“As Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the Trump-supporting US network Newsmax, said on the Today programme, the case is likely to cost between 50m and 100m to fight, not least because of the burden of discovery prompted by Trump’s lawyers demanding access to every email that mentions him in a bid to find bias. Suggesting a figure of about 10m, Ruddy urged the BBC to settle, like so many US news organisations including ABC and CBS News have already done, in response to this year’s threat. But how can the BBC settle when the case is, by most reasonable measures, absurd?”