If you click on this link, I suspect you’ll be treated, as I was, to a small pop-up ad from the Associated Press. “This giving season,” it reads, “stand for press freedom. Fundamental principles never go out of style. … Donate to the AP.”
I’m not sure when the AP got into the panhandling business, but, hey, more power to ‘em. Indeed, may their tin cup runneth over. As P.T. Barnum never actually said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
As for press freedom, I happen to agree with the AP. So should you. Press freedom is as important as it ever was, and besides, our Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees it. This freedom, though, has its limits — one of which is falsehood. The Constitution provides no such freedom of fabrication to the Fourth Estate, and the BBC is about to learn that glorious lesson the hard way.
As the aforementioned AP reports:
President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Monday seeking $10 billion in damages from the BBC, accusing the British broadcaster of defamation as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices.
The 33-page lawsuit accuses the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump,” calling it “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
At issue is Trump’s address from January 6, 2021, on the Ellipse just south of the White House — an address whose essential takeaway was this passage: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Peacefully. Peace-fully.
That’s the passage the legacy media and their fellow Democrats kept ignoring because it didn’t fit their narrative of Trump having incited an insurrection. Facts are stubborn things, though, and this fact long ago put the lie to those who claim that Trump called for a violent uprising.
Instead, the BBC aired a documentary in which it took little snippets of Trump’s speech from yawning distances apart, then mashed them together to make it seem as though the president said, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
I know, I know, the nerve of Trump, taking exception to a media organization splicing together two entirely separate parts of his speech to make it seem like he said the opposite of what he really said.
Making matters worse, the BBC’s documentary also took footage of the Proud Boys on their way to the Capitol before Trump’s speech and spliced it to make it seem like they were moved to violence by the president’s words.
As for the BBC, all it had to do was report truthfully. But like the scorpion that stings the frog on its way across the river, those silly Beebers just couldn’t help themselves. They just couldn’t help but defame Donald Trump. And now, as the Brits like to say, they’re in the soup.
Of course, none of this comes as a surprise to you, our loyal readers. We first hit this story more than a month ago. At the time, though, I sold President Trump short, suggesting that if the BBC didn’t make things right, he’d sue them “for a cool $1 billion.”
Turns out I was off by an order of magnitude. Blame it on Bidenflation.
It’s an eye-popping sum, to be sure, but this was an eye-popping piece of journalistic treachery. I suspect it’ll be settled out of court, but it’s yet another example of Trump holding the media accountable, as he did with CBS and ABC — both of which coughed up eight-figure mea culpas. Misery loves company, though, and the Beeb can now commiserate with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, both of which are currently being sued by Trump — the former for its deceptive coverage of his 2024 campaign, and the latter for its fake-news publication of a birthday card it claimed to have been penned by Trump to Democrat donor and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The BBC lawsuit seeks $5 billion in defamatory damages and $5 billion for unfair trade practices. The Beeb says it will defend itself, but that’s what they all say. We’ll see how eager these chaps are to air their dirty laundry during discovery, and to convince a jury of Floridians — as opposed to Londoners — that there’s nothingtoseeherekindlymovealong.
To my untrained eyes, this seems a heavy lift for the BBC. This is a defamation case, after all, and it seems to meet the five-part burden as outlined in the AP Style Guide: 1) a defamatory statement was made; 2) the defamatory statement is a matter of fact as opposed to opinion; 3) the defamatory statement is false; 4) the defamatory statement is about the plaintiff; and 5) the defamatory statement was published with the requisite degree of fault — in other words, as then-Chief Justice Earl Warren put it in the landmark 1967 Curtis Publishing Company v. Butts case, “with a reckless disregard for the truth.”
The BBC’s hopes rest with its contention that the documentary didn’t air in the U.S., but Trump’s team claims that Americans subscribing to BritBox or using VPNs could have seen it just the same.
We’re a long way from a settlement, but we should be grateful that someone is finally holding our duplicitous media’s feet to the fire. And, hey, $10 billion here, $10 billion there, and pretty soon Donald Trump will be talking about real money.
