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The BBC should not pay any money to Donald Trump, the former BBC director general Tony Hall has said.
The US president has said he plans to sue the BBC for up to $5bn (£3.8bn) despite receiving the apology he demanded over a misleading Panorama edit of his 6 January speech.
Speaking to BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Hall said the move should be blocked if Trump proceeded with his threats.
“No, [it] should not happen,” he said. “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.”
Hall, who stepped down as director general in 2020 after seven years in the role, called the video edit a “serious error”, and said it should have “been recognised as such much earlier in the whole process”. But the former BBC director general said he also worried that the “hard work, diligence and the belief in impartiality” of BBC journalists had been lost in the debate.
The row over an episode of Panorama from last year about the Capitol riot in 2021 led to accusations of bias at the broadcaster and the resignation of two of the most senior executives at the BBC: the director general, Tim Davie; and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of news.
On Thursday, reports said the BBC faced separate accusations of misleading viewers about 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.”
The BBC, which has agreed not to show the edition of Panorama again, sent an apology to Trump on Thursday but said there was no legal basis for him to sue the public broadcaster over a documentary his lawyers called defamatory. On Friday evening Trump told reporters onboard Air Force One: “We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and $5bn, probably sometime next week. We have to do it.”
The BBC chair, Samir Shah, sent a personal apology on Thursday to the White House and told lawmakers the edit was “an error of judgment”. The following day the culture minister, Lisa Nandy, said the apology was “right and necessary”.
Turmoil erupted at the BBC after the clip re-emerged a week ago when a leaked internal memo highlighted the misleading edit, in which the US president appeared to say: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The verbatim quote from the speech was: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” More than 50 minutes later Trump added: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
In an interview with GB News on Friday, Trump said the edit was “impossible to believe”. He added: “I made a beautiful statement, and they made it into a not beautiful statement. Fake news was a great term, except it’s not strong enough. This is beyond fake, this is corrupt.”
