Director General Tim Davie and CEO of News, Deborah Turness, both announced their exits from the corporation Sunday night, following a week of torrid headlines questioning the broadcaster’s political impartiality, and a series of direct attacks from figures on the right of British politics, as well as Trump’s own team.
According to NBC News and Fox News Digital, a letter from Trump’s legal team gave the BBC a deadline of 5 p.m. EST (10 p.m. in the U.K.) this coming Friday, Nov. 14, to “retract” any “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” about him.
Failure to comply will, Trump’s team reportedly said, mean the president will be “left with no alternative but to enforce his legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and are not waived, including by filing legal action for no less than $1,000,000,000 (One Billion Dollars) in damages. The BBC is on notice.”
BBC apology
The latest row over the BBC erupted last week when the Telegraph newspaper published a memo written by Michael Prescott, the BBC’s former standards advisor, covering a range of alleged failings in its content. That included its coverage of transgender issues, the war in Gaza, and Trump’s presidency.
The most damning claim was that footage in the Panorama show had been selectively edited to suggest the U.S. president had told supporters in January 2021: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
The words were, it emerged, spliced from sections of the speech almost an hour apart, and omitted a section in which Trump had said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
