An American friend described modern Britain to me as “a health service with a nuclear deterrent.” This is unfair. Modern Britain is a health service with a nuclear deterrent, and also the BBC. President Donald Trump‘s threat to sue Britain’s state broadcaster for $1 billion for its “reckless disregard for the truth” could, if carried out, mean the end of the British state as we know it.
“Knowledge is power,” wrote Francis Bacon, a servant of the Elizabethan and Jacobean states. In our age, agglomerated information is power. The BBC does not just exploit its privileges, notably a mandatory license fee, to deform Britain’s media market and police its domestic debate. “Auntie,” as the British are instructed to call her, is more than a nanny state of mind. She deploys her state subsidies and historic prestige to retain her place as the world’s most powerful disseminator of information. Hollywood’s entertainment empire merely ensures that everyone speaks English. In the war of political narratives, it is the BBC that keeps the old imperial hub of London at the center of the informational map.
Trump often recklessly disregards the truth, and his use of the world’s biggest bully pulpit against the media smacks of intimidation. But there is little doubt that the BBC lied about him. In October 2024, a week before polling day in the presidential elections, “Panorama,” the BBC’s flagship investigative program, broadcast Trump: A Second Chance? The program spliced together footage of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech to the crowd in Washington, D.C., that, shortly after, rioted at the Capitol. Fifteen minutes into his speech, Trump said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be with you … to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Fifty-four minutes later, after denouncing the Democrats and other enemies, he said, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The BBC edited this into, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be with you, and we fight. We fight like hell …”
The edit came to attention on Nov. 6, when the Telegraph published a leaked internal report. The doctoring of Trump’s speech was only one of the “serious and systemic problems” it found. A “specialist LGBTQ desk” imposed “effective censorship” on the transgender issue, with a “constant drip-feed of one-sided stories” masking biological and medical facts. Consistent “selection bias” downplayed key domestic matters, such as illegal migrants and immigrant crime, and promoted a false claim from BBC Verify, the corporation’s fact-checker, that car insurers penalized ethnic minorities. Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war was flooded with Hamas propaganda. The BBC reports on the U.S. elections called Trump voters “election deniers” and falsely suggested that he wanted to “shoot Liz Cheney in the face.”
The BBC board rejected the report’s findings. In a May 2025 meeting, Jonathan Munro, BBC News’s global director, called the “Panorama” edit “normal practice” and denied an “attempt to mislead the audience.” On Nov. 9, following the Telegraph leak, Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and Deborah Turness, its head of news and current affairs, announced their resignations. Yet the chairman, Samir Shah, denied “systemic bias” and said the “Panorama” edit was an “error of judgement.” Turness’s temporary replacement is Jonathan Munro. The BBC cannot be fixed.
In a media-saturated society, the state broadcaster becomes a vital organ of the state. The BBC’s task is not to communicate neutral facts, should they still exist, or to stage debates; as in more explicit forms of constitutional government, the questions are already settled. The BBC exists to sustain its monopoly in the information-power nexus by de-dramatizing dynamic events, disseminating carrot-and-stick information about the state’s expectations and rewards, and uniting viewers and listeners around the state’s messaging. Exporting the message to the English-speaking world was always foundational to the mission: The BBC was created in 1922 as an imperial narrative machine. None of this is news. “Auntie’s” most famous employee, George Orwell, recognized it in World War II, and fictionalized it in 1984.
Today, the BBC’s suppression of bad news works in tandem with the British government’s increasingly oppressive speech controls. The Trump administration has openly criticized those, and especially their implications for American citizens and social media. The BBC’s propagandizing piggybacks on the same American-run digital networks. If Trump causes the BBC’s break-up, it will be because the BBC’s crisis of narrative control is the crisis of a British state that is already revealed as incompetent in both domestic and foreign policy. Mass refusal to pay the license fee is one proof among many that the British people are withdrawing their consent to be misled, in both senses of the word. Defund the Ministry of Truth, and reforming the British state becomes possible. A free market in information is not just preferable to Orwellian monopolies and manipulations or American interests. As in trade negotiations, Trump may be doing the old country a favor.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
