Ex-BBC chief Tony Hall urges corporation not to pay money to Donald Trump

A former BBC director general has urged the corporation not to pay any money to Donald Trump after the US president threatened legal action.

The American leader has vowed to sue the BBC this week, even after the broadcaster apologised. However, the corporation declined Mr Trump’s demand to compensate him for its edited version of a 2021 speech broadcast by Panorama.

Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday evening, the US president said he would sue the BBC for “anywhere between $1 billion (£759.8 million) and $5 billion (£3.79 billion), probably sometime next week”.

But Lord Tony Hall, who was the BBC’s director-general for seven years until he stepped down in 2020, dismissed Mr Trump’s threats over the weekend. He said it would not be “appropriate” for the corporation to pay any “public money” to the American leader.

He told BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “No, [it] should not happen. I don’t think we should agree to any money being paid to Donald Trump. You’re talking about licence fee payers’ money, you’re talking about public money. It would not be appropriate.”

Sir Keir Starmer was urged to intervene in the row over the weekend, with Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey calling on the prime minister to “demand” that Mr Trump “drops his ludicrous lawsuit”.

On Thursday, the broadcaster said the edit of the American leader’s speech on 6 January 2021 had given the “mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”.

The BBC apologised and said the splicing of the speech was an “error of judgment”, but refused to pay financial compensation after the president’s lawyers threatened to sue for damages unless a retraction and apology were published.

Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House to apologise for the editing, and lawyers for the corporation wrote to the president’s legal team, a BBC spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added: “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”

Announcing his decision to pursue legal action on Friday evening, Mr Trump told reporters: “I think I have to do it. They’ve even admitted that they cheated… They changed the words coming out of my mouth. The people of the UK are very angry about what happened.”

In a separate interview with GB News broadcast on Saturday, the US president said: “I’m not looking to get into lawsuits, but I think I have an obligation to do it. This was so egregious. If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people.”

He added that the lawsuit would “probably” be filed “some place in the US”, but said that litigation in the UK “moves a little bit quickly”.

The Panorama scandal prompted the resignations of two of the BBC’s most senior executives: director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness.

The programme, broadcast a week before the 2024 US election results, spliced two clips together so that Mr Trump appeared to tell the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

The broadcaster said it will not air the Panorama episode ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’ again, and published a retraction on the show’s webpage on Thursday.

According to BBC News, the broadcaster set out five main arguments in its letter to Mr Trump’s legal team as to why it did not believe there was a basis for a defamation claim. It said the BBC did not distribute the Panorama episode on its US channels and was restricted on iPlayer to viewers in the UK; that the documentary did not cause Mr Trump harm as he was later re-elected; that the edit was not done with malice and was designed to shorten a long speech; that it was not meant to be considered in isolation but as part of an hour-long programme; and that an opinion on a matter of public concern and political speech is heavily protected under defamation laws in the US.

On Thursday, reports said that the BBC faced separate accusations of misleading viewers about Mr Trump’s 2021 Capitol speech more than two years before the Panorama edit aired. In an episode broadcast in June 2022, Newsnight reportedly played an edited version of his speech, similar to the one used in the Panorama programme.

A BBC spokesperson said about the fresh claims, reported by The Telegraph’s ‘Daily T’ podcast: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”