from the most-openly-censorial-president dept
The BBC is now voluntarily suppressing criticism of Donald Trump before it airs—and the reason is obvious: Trump threatened to sue them into oblivion, and they blinked.
Historian Rutger Bregman revealed this week that the BBC commissioned a public lecture from him last month, recorded it, then quietly cut a single sentence before broadcast. The deleted line? Calling Trump “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” Bregman posted about the capitulation, noting that the decision came from “the highest levels” of the BBC—meaning the executives dealing with Trump’s threats.
Well, at least we should call out Donald Trump as the most openly censorial president in American history.
This is the payoff from Trump’s censorship campaign against the BBC. Weeks ago, Trump threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars over an edit in a program it aired a year ago. The BBC apologized and fired employees associated with the project. That wasn’t enough. Trump’s FCC censorship lackey Brendan Carr launched a bullshit investigation anyway. And now the BBC is preemptively editing out true statements that might anger the thin-skinned man baby who will soon be President again.
Bregman posted the exact line that got cut. Here’s the full paragraph, with the censored sentence in bold:
On one side we had an establishment propping up an elderly man in obvious mental decline. On the other we had a convicted reality star who now rules as the most openly corrupt president in American history. When it comes to staffing his administration, he is a modern day Caligula, the Roman emperor who wanted to make his horse a consul. He surrounds himself with loyalists, grifters, and sycophants.
Gosh, for what reason would the BBC cut that one particular line?
The BBC admitted to this in the most mealy-mouthed way when asked by the New Republic to comment on the situation:
Asked for comment on Bregman’s charge, a spokesperson for the BBC emailed me this: “All of our programmes are required to comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, and we made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice.”
“On legal advice.” Translation: Trump’s SLAPP suit threats worked exactly as intended.
Greg Sargent, writing in the New Republic, nails why this matters:
There is something deeply perverse in this outcome. Even if you grant Trump’s criticism of the edit of his January 6 speech—never mind that as the violence raged, Trump essentially sat on his hands for hours and arguably directed the mob to target his vice president—the answer to this can’t be to let Trump bully truth-telling into self-censoring silence.
That’s plainly what happened here.
Exactly. The BBC’s initial capitulation—the apology, the firings, the groveling—was bad enough. But this is worse. This is pre-censorship. The BBC is now editing out true statements about Trump before they air, purely because they’re afraid of how he might react. That’s not “legal advice.” That’s cowardice institutionalized as policy.
Once again, I remind you that Trump’s supporters have, for years, insisted that he was “the free speech president” and have talked about academic freedom and the right to state uncomfortable ideas.
Yet, do we hear any of them complaining about this obvious suppression of speech following a clear and censorial threat from the president? Of course not. Will the media continue to pretend that Donald Trump supports free speech, even as he’s the most openly censorial president in history? Of course.
It would be nice if more people would at least acknowledge what a farce all of this is. And it would also be nice if the BBC didn’t so quickly cave to such bogus threats.
And where are all those self-proclaimed free speech warriors now? The ones who spent years screaming about “cancel culture” and “academic freedom”?
Silent, of course. Because it was never about principles. It was about whose speech gets protected. Trump can threaten to bankrupt a media organization for accurately describing his role in an insurrection, and the same people who lose their minds over a college speaker getting heckled will find a way to justify it or simply look away.
The media will continue this charade too. They’ll keep treating Trump’s “free speech” posturing as if it’s sincere, even as he openly threatens journalists, demands the imprisonment of critics, and bullies foreign and domestic media organizations into self-censorship. We’re watching the most openly censorial president in American history deploy the legal system as a weapon against truthful speech, and the political press mostly covers it as just another controversy, not the authoritarian playbook it actually is.
The BBC made a choice here. Not a good one, not a legally required one, but a choice. They decided that avoiding Trump’s wrath was more important than telling the truth. That calculation might make sense in the short term—legal bills are expensive, and Trump’s vindictiveness is well-documented. But in the long term, this is how authoritarians win. Not by directly seizing control of the press, but by making media organizations internalize the censor, editing themselves before the threats even arrive.
Every institution that caves makes the next capitulation easier. Every truth that gets preemptively deleted because it might anger Trump makes it clearer that speaking truth about Trump comes with consequences that institutions increasingly won’t risk. This is the test, and the BBC is failing it.
Filed Under: censorship, chilling effects, corruption, donald trump, free speech, rutger bregman, slapp suits
Companies: bbc
