'We've got to fight for our journalism,' BBC director general tells staff

After Donald Trump threatened to sue the corporation for $1 billion (£760 million) over a Panorama scheme, BBC outgoing director general Tim Davie will speak with staff on Tuesday morning. It came after a leaked internal BBC memo that said the program had misled viewers by splicing together two portions of the US president's speech on January 20, 2021, making it seem as if he had explicitly encouraged the riot. If the BBC did not make a full and fair retraction of the programme by Friday, Trump threatened to take legal action. According to the BBC, it will respond in due course. On Tuesday, Davie, who arrived at the BBC's London headquarters, said he was very proud of the journalists in this building doing very important work.

He told reporters assembled outside,

I'm here to lead and assist them personally. Davie's staff call will take place mid-morning. He said on Sunday that the

current discussion

around the company was not the sole reason for his resignation, but that

understandably contributedto it.Overall, the BBC is doing well, but there have been some mistakes made and as the BBC's director general, I must take ultimate responsibility.

Deborah Turness, the company's outgoing CEO who resigned with Davie, maintained on Monday that the firm was not

institutionally biased. Separately, BBC chair Samir Shah has said that the BBC would like to apologise for the edit, which he described as a

error of judgmentthat gave the appearance of adirect call for violent activity. In a private session of the Culture, Media, and Sport (CMS) Committee, the topic is likely to be discussed in the Commons later in the day. Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, is also expected to make a speech in the Commons.

On Sunday, Trump's legal team wrote to the BBC, threatening to take legal proceedings over the

false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading, and inflamatory

claims. It demands that the president be apologetic and that the BBC appropriately compensate him. Alejandro Brito, Trump's counsel, also accused the BBC of defamation under Florida law. The programme, which first appeared on October 24, 2024, is not available on iPlayer, although the BBCnotedon said it was over a year old on Monday. Any current affairs programs, including Panorama, are only available for 365 days.

We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're coming to celebrate our brave senators and congresswomen and women,

Trump said in his address on January 6th, 2021.

We're going to walk down to the Capitol, we're really going to talk to the capitol,

he was shown on the Panorama program. and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell. "The two sections that were stitched together were stitching together were more than 50 minutes apart.

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer, said it would be impossible for Trump to bring the lawsuit to the United States since his team would have to show that the program had been shown there.

Panorama was not broadcast in the United States, and BBC iPlayer isn't available,

he said,

it's not clear that any US court would have jurisdiction to hear the allegation. Stephens said that if this were

the particular court hill [Trump] wants to die on,he did not think this wasthe one that [Trumped] wants, not to die.

Any damning word he's ever said is going to be played back to him and picked over him because of poor publicity.

George Freeman, a former New York Times assistant general counsel, referred to the figures in legal lawsuits in the United States, including the $1 billion in Trump's, as complete meaningless and empty.It's so meaningless that, when I was at the New York Times, we had a rule that the paper wouldn't print the amount sued for,

he said on the BBC's World Tonight show. Trump's staff would need to demonstrate a

gross distortion

of his word, that the editing harmed his image, and that

it was done intentionally to produce a different meaning," Trump said.

Following the leaked internal memo issued last week by the Telegraph newspaper, which highlighted the Panorama edit that was first broadcast in October 2024, the unprecedented joint resignations at the BBC came after rising resistance after its first broadcasting in October 20,2024. Michael Prescott, a former independent external advisor to the broadcaster's editorial standards committee, wrote the memo, which also raised questions about other topics. Among other troubling issues included, it has raised questions over the BBC's Gaza coverage, particularly by BBC Arabic, anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias, and one-sided transgender reporting. The BBC chair, responding to the fears for the first time on Monday, said it was simply not true that the memo had uncovered problems the BBC had sought to ignore - or that the BBC hadn't done nothing to address the issues raised in the memo. Sir Keir Starmer's spokeswoman said on Monday that the prime minister did not agree that the BBC was

institutionally biased. The BBC also denied that it was

corrupt," a term Trump used to describe some of its journalists who opposed the Panorama show.

Sir Robbie Gibb, a former senior editor at the BBC who was in charge of communications for Theresa May in Downing Street, has been barred from the BBC board, while Sir Robby Gibb , formerly senior editor, has had been on the

rightwing militants have been attacking the BBC for years,

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey wrote in the Guardian. Sir Robbie should not have no part in naming the new director general to protect the BBC's independence and impartiality, he wrote.

The government should ban him from the board immediately and put an end to the use of political appointments, which sorely undermines the BBC. Sir Robbie has not responded. According to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, the focus should be on the mistakes made

rather than chasing people because of their political convictions. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Conservative MP, told the BBC's Newsnight programme that the government should remain out of the latest controversy

because the BBC wishes to maintain its independence from the government. When asked about the US president's threat of legal trouble, he said,

I would have hoped that the BBC would have reached an agreement with Donald Trump. It won't be a billion, but it will be something less than half of what it will have been.

Is this how you treat your best ally, how you handle your best friend?

said reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who said that the BBC has been institutionally biased for decades, he told a London news conference on Friday. '".