is the bbc beastly enough to fascists (4): 2025
From the moment Donald Trump took the oath of office again on 20 January 2025, BBC coverage of the United States has been running on two tracks at once. On one track sit the familiar forms of BBC journalism, Washington based correspondents fronting BBC World News America, the Americast podcast unpacking US politics for a UK audience, and straight online explainers about policy. On the other track sits an increasingly fraught argument about impartiality, centred on BBC handling of Trump himself and culminating, late in 2025, in the Panorama editing scandal, the threat of a multibillion dollar lawsuit and the resignation of the director general and the head of news. To ask whether BBC coverage of Trump’s second presidency has been beastly towards him is to ask how those tracks fit together.
The institutional setting matters first. The BBC entered the Trump second term in a financially and politically delicate condition. Licence fee income in the UK was under pressure and the corporation was under instruction to grow commercial revenue overseas. In June 2025 the Guardian reported that senior BBC figures were examining plans to make American users pay for some BBC journalism, either through subscriptions or paid add ons, precisely because they believed there was a market for an impartial brand in a highly polarised US media system during Trump’s second term. BBC executives saw opportunity in American distrust of partisan outlets and were building a bigger digital newsroom in Washington and more live programming from the US capital. At the same time, surveys still listed the BBC among the most trusted news sources for US audiences, alongside the Weather Channel, a useful reminder that its reputation for fairness is an asset it is keen to protect.
The return of Trump, and the way he and his allies attack media that criticise him, therefore intersected with a BBC that wanted to sell itself as impartial to an American audience while also surviving a noisy British culture war over supposed liberal bias. That double vulnerability frames much of what follows. BBC coverage of the second Trump presidency begins, by definition, with the inauguration itself. Tabloid reports made an issue of BBC reporter Caitríona Perry’s encounter with Kid Rock during inauguration programming, when the singer told her on air that she sounded sexy and asked whether she would go skiing with him. Perry, clearly uncomfortable, moved the interview on and continued reporting on the wider context of Trump’s swearing in and the weekend victory rally. That small incident illustrates the BBC’s default mode of presence. Its reporters are on the ground, mingling with Trump supporters and high profile backers, broadcasting live and trying to keep a professional tone in a noisy, often performative political environment.
In the weeks after 20 January, BBC radio and podcast coverage did what it has now done for several US administrations. Americast, fronted by Justin Webb and Sarah Smith, devoted set piece episodes to Trump’s first hundred days and then his first six months. Those programmes became a standard reference for people trying to make sense of the new term. The mid year review episode, “Donald Trump’s mid year review”,describes six months of the second term in which Trump has dominated headlines and asks how much he has actually achieved and what he could improve. It features Webb and Smith interviewing Marc Short, former chief of staff to Mike Pence, who is well placed to defend Trump’s governing style but is also pushed to offer some candid assessment.
The tone of Americast is familiar from the first Trump term. Webb, a long time Radio 4 presenter, and Smith, the BBC’s North America editor, locate Trump in a narrative about American institutions. They mix descriptive reporting, wry observation and occasional exasperation, while making a point of having figures from Trump’s orbit on air. As a form, this can be presented as neutral, or at least as balanced, because the journalists are not campaigning for or against Trump, and because his allies are able to speak. It is also unavoidably interpretive. The selection of topics and the framing of questions make clear that Trump’s assaults on checks and balances, his language about enemies and his policy shocks are the core concern. The episode description speaks about how much he has actually achieved, which already implies a certain scepticism about the gap between noise and substance.
Alongside Americast sits BBC World News America, broadcast on BBC News and on partner stations in the United States. BBC World News America applies the house style that goes back to earlier decades. The anchor’s voice is calm, mid Atlantic, and the language is clipped. Trump’s words are quoted, usually as short soundbites that foreground eye catching claims. The surrounding structure highlights contradictions. In a Ukraine report, the BBC clip from Preston stresses that Trump is now dismissing as unlikely the very meeting he had trumpeted as almost inevitable a few days before. In a Caribbean and Honduras report, Somaskanda links the Caribbean boat strikes, which Trump calls successful, with civil liberties concerns, then connects the Hernández pardon with both Trump’s anti drugs rhetoric and a live Honduran election crisis that Reuters and others describe as knife edge. The result is not neutral even if it doesn't explicitly get beastly about him. It quietly invites the viewer to see inconsistencies and tensions in Trump’s policy.
The domestic BBC News bulletins show BBC television segments titled “Geneva hosts Ukraine talks as Trump pushes peace plan” in late November 2025, evidence that Trump’s role in brokering a Russia Ukraine settlement is being given prominent attention, and that a straightforward news frame emphasises his initiative even while analysis elsewhere questions its details. Another clip focuses on Hong Kong apartment block fires, with Trump present only as background in discussion of wider geopolitical strain. If we assemble these strands for the first six to eight months of the term, BBC coverage looks like this. On linear TV and radio, Trump is treated as the necessary lead for many foreign stories. BBC World News America routinely opens with “President Trump says” followed by his latest statement on Israel, Ukraine, tariffs or Venezuela’s airspace, then balances those statements with reactions from foreign governments and some critical context.
On radio and podcast the interpretive layer is thicker, with Americast, and sometimes World Service programmes, asking what Trump is really achieving and what it means for US democracy. Occupying a slightly different space, BBC social media investigations correspondent Marianna Spring continues her reporting on conspiracy theories and online hate, now explicitly set against the background of a renewed Trump era. She presents series such as Marianna in Conspiracyland and Why Do You Hate Me and is one of the presenters of Americast and she often looks at how Trump aligned influencers and networks operate online, and how disinformation circulates around his messages.
This bundle of coverage is impartial in a narrow, procedural sense. The main news programmes report what Trump says, include official responses, and let his own chosen spokespersons appear in interviews. Americast brings on Marc Short and other sympathetic voices from the Republican world as well as Democrats and critics. Spring’s documentaries talk to conspiracy believers and Trump loyalists rather than only to their opponents. Viewed as a performance of the BBC’s own guidelines, that matters.
The current neutrality debate, however, does not come from those day to day choices. It comes from a specific scandal that exploded in November 2025 but that was rooted in a Panorama documentary broadcast a year earlier, during the 2024 campaign, and from a broader backlash that used that scandal to paint a picture of systemic bias in coverage of Trump’s second run and then his second term. The facts of the Panorama case are relatively clear. In late October 2024 BBC One aired a 57 minute Panorama special titled Trump, A Second Chance, days before US voters went to the polls. One section of the film used archive footage of Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech on the day of the Capitol attack. In the edited version, three separate phrases from different points in the address were cut together so that Trump appeared to urge supporters to march with him and to “fight like hell”, without including his scripted line about protesting “peacefully and patriotically”. In other words it presented the fascist as beastly, which he objectively is, but used unprofessional means to do so. The film did not air in the United States and was geoblocked on iPlayer, but clips circulated online and rival broadcasters, Trump allies and sections of the British press argued that the edit misled viewers about what he had said.
For some months that complaint simmered. Only after Trump’s re election, once he was back in office and his relations with British institutions were even more politically sensitive, did it explode. In early November 2025 an internal memo written by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC Editorial Standards Committee, was leaked to the Daily Telegraph. In it Prescott accused the corporation of systemic editorial bias, using the Panorama edit as his central case. He claimed that the edit was obviously misleading, that concerns had been raised internally and that BBC bosses had tried to bury them. He linked that example with others, including a 2022 Newsnight segment that used similar splicing and coverage of Gaza, to argue that the BBC was leaning consistently in a liberal direction. Objectively this was not true, of course, because it's objectively true that Trump did incite the attempted insurrection even though he was misquoted in the segment, and the current Israeli leadership are fascists committing genocide in Gaza, and so objective reporting should always be beastly towards them. It should do so according to standards of unbiased reporting however, and the Panorama splice violated those.
The fallout was rapid. Within days director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness resigned, both denying that there was institutional bias but acknowledging serious mistakes. BBC chair Samir Shah appeared before a parliamentary committee and described the Panorama edit as an error of judgement, for which he apologised, while insisting that Prescott’s memo did not fairly represent the way the BBC handled editorial debates. In a letter to Trump, whose legal team was now threatening a lawsuit of between one and five billion dollars, Shah issued a personal apology and confirmed that the film would not be rebroadcast, though he rejected the idea that the edit amounted to defamation. Shah is right on this of course. The edit was a bad journalistic mistake but did not show Trump to be anything other than what he was, and so couldn't be defamatory. It presented the truth but in a manner that pointlessly violated good journalism.
Trump, for his part, seized on the saga as proof that the BBC was a hostile, dishonest outlet . A Guardian live blog quotes him threatening to sue for one billion dollars and accusing the corporation of electoral interference, while Time magazine notes that he has floated higher figures in speeches and has instructed lawyers to pursue the case in Florida if possible. An AP piece frames the resignations as a huge blow to an institution revered by some Britons as a national treasure and derided by others as outdated and left leaning, neatly catching the way the BBC is caught in domestic culture wars as well as in transatlantic politics. The US Federal Communications Commission even opened an inquiry into whether US carriers such as PBS had ever aired the Panorama footage or rebroadcast it online, although legal experts quoted by the Financial Times were sceptical that any regulatory violation could be proved.
Around this core set of facts, a secondary argument has grown about what the episode says about BBC neutrality. Some critics on the right take Prescott’s memo and the edit as definitive proof that the BBC is institutionally anti Trump. Nigel Farage and other laughable Reform UK figures have called the film electoral interference and demanded deeper reform of BBC governance. On the other side, commentators such as Dorothy Byrne, former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, have written that the problem was incompetence rather than ideology, a failure of editorial scrutiny and management culture that allowed a sloppy but easily avoidable edit to survive. A Prospect Magazine essay similarly acknowledges that the edit was an unnecessary own goal, while insisting that the underlying reality that Trump inspired and celebrated the Capitol attack remains indisputable.
The BBC’s own formal response is that the Panorama decision was wrong but not evidence of systemic anti Trump bias. Shah and other senior figures point to the existence of the Editorial Standards Committee itself, to the fact that conservative voices appear regularly on BBC output, and to the decision to geoblock the film so that it did not air in the United States, as signs that the corporation still takes impartiality seriously. Journalists inside the BBC, such as Deborah Cohen, have given interviews pushing back on the idea of a liberal groupthink and arguing that pressure comes from all sides, not just from progressive campaigners.
For an analyst trying to judge BBC coverage of Trump’s second presidency to date, there are three layers to separate. At the level of day to day news, BBC output about Trump in 2025 has mostly adhered to established norms. World News America and domestic bulletins report his statements and actions in a fairly straightforward way, quote his opponents and allies, and place events in context. When he announces a ceasefire plan in the Middle East, the BBC reports it, notes what Israeli and Palestinian actors say, and highlights doubts. When he pardons a convicted drug lord and ex president of Honduras, the BBC notes both the act and the criticism that it interferes in an ongoing Honduran election and contradicts his own declared war on people bringing drugs into the USA.
At the level of interpretive programming aimed at UK and global audiences, such as Americast and BBC podcasts, the tone is more sceptical and so a little bit beastly towards fascists - because objectively reporting on fascists requires you call them fascists. Webb, Smith and Spring talk about Trump in ways that assume their listeners see him as an unusual and dangerous president, and they choose guests and topics that interrogate his attacks on institutions, his alignment with Project 2025 style policy agendas and his indulgence of conspiracy movements. They often acknowledge the motivations of his voters, talk about economic and cultural grievances, and bring on sympathetic figures like Marc Short, but the overall narrative is one in which Trumpism is something to be explained and contained rather than simply treated as one normal partisan position among many.
At the level of institutional politics and scandal, the Panorama Beastly edit and its fallout have given Trump and his allies a powerful weapon. They can point to a concrete mistake, one that clearly made him look more beastly than a more faithful edit would have done, and fold it into a wider story about liberal media determined to beastify him. Whether or not that story is fair, it is rhetorically effective, and it places the BBC in a defensive crouch. For the rest of the second term, BBC editors who cover Trump will know that any slip can be weaponised in the same way.
Seen in aggregate, that mix produces something close to a mirror image of the BBC’s early treatment of Nazi Germany in the nineteen thirties. Then, a posture of calm neutrality concealed a structural alignment with appeasement and an underestimation of the threat. Now, a posture of calm neutrality towards Trump coexists with interpretive programmes that are openly worried about his authoritarian beastliness and with a political environment in which the BBC is attacked, often unfairly, as part of a liberal establishment. The difference is that today the corporation consciously markets its impartiality to Americans who are tired of Fox and MSNBC shouting matches, even as it becomes a character in Trump’s own running feud with the media.
In judging neutrality, then, it is important to hold two thoughts at once. First, BBC newsrooms covering Trump’s second term are full of journalists who make real efforts to be accurate, to represent opposing voices and to flag when they are moving from fact into analysis. Surveys that place the BBC high in trust rankings are not meaningless. Second, the corporation has made at least one serious mistake in its handling of Trump footage, a mistake that confirms, for many of his supporters, their pre existing belief that the BBC is out to get him. That belief will colour how a significant slice of the US audience hears anything the BBC says about the president, however carefully balanced it is. From a strictly analytical point of view, BBC coverage of Trump’s second presidency to date is neutral in the narrow sense that it does not campaign against him and that it gives him, his aides and his policies prominent airtime. It is not neutral in the thicker sense of being detached from a judgement that his politics pose particular challenges to democratic norms. Americast and much of the interpretive output starts from exactly that judgement. Nor is the institutional environment neutral, given the centrality of Trump’s own attacks on the BBC to current rows over funding, governance and editorial standards.
So the situation, inevitably, is mixed. The BBC still aspires to the impartiality it advertises and often achieves it in daily news reporting. At the same time, its relationship with Trump in his second term is now structured around mutual suspicion, occasional moments of cooperation, and one highly visible error that his team will keep invoking, not because it proves that every BBC report about him is biased, but because it is an effective way to discredit those reports in advance.
But to be honest, the BBC has not been beastly towards Trump so far and had it really been impartial it would have been.