Prior to this year, it was unheard of for a sitting U.S. president to sue a news outlet. In just a few months, President Donald Trump has managed to make this commonplace.
Trump has sued The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and now the BBC, each time filing the suit in Florida and each time alleging defamation.
Numerous legal experts informed CNN that the central grievances are weak—and that the real motive might be publicity.
The latest suit, against the BBC this week, claims that a faulty edit of a campaign film was a slanderous attempt to sway American voters, even though the film was not aired in the U.S.
The claim “lacks legal merit on both defamation and jurisdictional grounds,” asserted Bob Corn-Reeves, senior counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“This is nothing more than another effort by the president to intimidate media companies he views as adversaries of his administration,” he stated.
The pattern is self-evident: Trump immediately garners newspaper headlines for a legal battle, portraying bold action against media misdeeds, while some of his followers cheer for a multi-billion dollar verdict that would harm a perceived opponent.
And then the media’s lawyers dissect the complaint and find numerous holes in it.
Dylan McLemore, who studies media law and teaches at Oklahoma State University, told CNN, “The decision to file suit in Florida relates to the underlying question in all of the president’s defamation suits against media companies—is he bringing them to win in court or to generate headlines and chill critical press commentary?”
McLemore and several other media law scholars expressed skepticism about the suit versus the BBC, despite the British broadcaster having already admitted the flawed edit and apologized for it.
“An apology is not an admission of guilt,” McLemore noted. “In fact, in defamation cases, the defendant can argue that a public apology reduces the harm to the plaintiff.”
Regarding the ‘faulty edit’ in question
The matter concerns the October 2024 broadcast of the BBC documentary series “Panorama.” The episode, focusing on Trump’s reelection campaign, merged two separate segments of Trump’s notorious January 6, 2021, speech to create the impression he told the crowd he would go with them to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”
In the actual address, his exhortations to “fight” were separated from the suggestion to proceed to the Capitol to “support our brave senators and congressmen.”
The BBC’s program ought to have made the edit apparent to viewers, perhaps with a white flash effect—a common editing technique.
However, the flawed edit did not draw notice at the time of the documentary’s television premiere. It only came to light this autumn when a memo from a former BBC advisor regarding editorial shortcomings surfaced in a British newspaper.
Trump and his allies utilized the faulty edit to exert political pressure on the BBC and to contest Trump’s central role in inciting the January 6 insurrection.
President Donald Trump
President Donald Trump Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
However, the BBC “multiple U.S. judges have noted President Trump’s repeated exhortations to ‘fight’ and ‘stop the steal’ as central to the riot’s occurrence,” the London-based media lawyer Mark Stephens said in an email message.
Those expressions, “combined with urging supporters to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue (albeit peacefully), could be interpreted as directed at inciting imminent lawless action.” And that is, “in essence,” what the BBC conveyed in the documentary, Stephens said. “Indeed, U.S. judges have already made those characterizations in many suits.”
The BBC said Tuesday that it will defend itself against Trump’s lawsuit.
The free expression group PEN America called the suit “a coercive ploy to globalize his domestic threats to a free and independent press and to chill reporting overseas.”
High bar for proving actual malice
“The headline on the legal analysis in all of these suits has to be how extraordinarily protective the First Amendment is of news outlets in libel cases involving public figures,” University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones told CNN.
In the BBC case, “many have noted that this editing fell short of excellent journalism — indeed, the BBC itself has conceded this, and the Trump complaint emphasizes the internal and external critiques the BBC has faced. These are bad facts,” she said.
But the BBC’s apology doesn’t matter in a court of law: “Trump must show knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth,” Jones said.
And “the bar to prove actual malice in news editing is remarkably high,” McLemore added.
Both professors predicted a legal fight over Trump’s decision to file suit in Florida.
According to the BBC, it did not televise or stream the documentary in the U.S. Trump’s complaint suggests that some Floridians streamed the UK broadcast using a virtual private network, though it doesn’t cite any specific examples of anyone doing so.
“Whether and how actual Floridians were impacted by this documentary is going to be a real centerpiece of the action,” Andersen Jones said.
The BBC will likely move to have the case thrown out right away on jurisdictional grounds.
The venue is also important because the suit seeks $10 billion in damages, which is “hard to sustain in any defamation case,” Andersen Jones added. “That is an incredibly difficult figure to maintain without strong proof that a real audience was reached. The fight over that will be significant.”
Trump often welcomes disputes with major news organizations, although recent history shows that when the defendants opt for a trial rather than settling with him, courts tend to uphold the First Amendment.
The International Press Institute stated Tuesday that the BBC lawsuit is “plainly disproportionate, and its excessively punitive nature is consistent with Trump’s attempts to target news organizations—including outlets outside the U.S.—that report critically on the administration.”
Scott Griffen, the institute’s executive director, said the suit is “intended as a warning for media organizations worldwide.”
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