IS THE BBC BEASTLY ENOUGH TO FASCISTS (5): 2017-2021
When Donald Trump became president in January 2017 the BBC suddenly had to cover a White House that treated mainstream media as an enemy, but it also had to keep its own statutory promise of due impartiality. That combination shaped almost everything it did about Trump in his first term, from straight news bulletins, to Jon Sopel’s White House coverage, to the launch of 100 Days, Beyond 100 Days, Americast and finally the documentary series The Trump Show. To decide how neutral that coverage really was you have to look at concrete programmes and at the internal rows that broke out over impartiality, especially around racism.
Institutionally, the BBC went into the Trump years in the middle of an overhaul of its own regulatory system. The BBC Trust, which had overseen accuracy and impartiality, was being wound up in 2017 and Ofcom was about to become the external regulator. The Trust had already commissioned a series of impartiality reviews which, as a Shorenstein Center assessment notes, did not find clear partisan bias but did criticise the BBC for sometimes failing to give enough context for audiences to make sense of issues like Brexit and Trump. At the same time, the wider UK debate about BBC bias was heating up, with attacks over Brexit coverage from both sides that prefigured later rows about Trump. On the American side Trump came to office insisting that most major outlets were fake news. The BBC was not spared. In February 2017 he pointed at Jon Sopel in a televised press conference and called the BBC 'another beauty', implying it was biased. Sopel replied that the BBC was impartial, free and fair, before going on to ask his question about Trump’s reported preference for friendly questions from conservative outlets. An internal complaint argued that Sopel’s description of the BBC might breach impartiality rules. The BBC Editorial Standards Committee later published a bulletin explaining why the complaint was rejected. It stated that as the BBC’s North America editor a fundamental part of Sopel’s role was to give informed analysis of key events and that calling the BBC impartial, free and fair was just an explanation of the corporation’s own values, not a partisan claim.That exchange contains in miniature the dynamic that followed. Trump attacked the BBC as biased. Sopel publicly insisted on impartiality, but his journalistic practice involved a lot of interpretive commentary about Trump’s style and impact. The BBC then defended that practice internally as consistent with due impartiality.
Sopel became the BBC voice most closely associated with Trump’s first term. He had been North America editor since before the 2016 election and he remained in the post until 2021. He wrote a book with the pointed title If Only They Did Not Speak English, reflecting his view that British audiences misunderstood the US because it felt too familiar. In interviews he described Trump’s America as the most challenging journalistic assignment he had had and stressed that impartiality did not mean avoiding hard questions.He told Radio Times that it was not the BBC’s job to hurl stones back at Trump, but to hold power to account, and that rigorous, fact based reporting was more important than ever in the Trump era. In practice that meant a style that mixed straight reporting with wry asides and occasional visible scepticism. Sopel’s pieces from Trump rallies or the White House lawn often pointed out contradictions in Trump’s statements or highlighted the theatricality of his events, but they did so in the measured voice the BBC cultivates for its senior correspondents. An internal impartiality review quoted in his favour stressed that audiences expected analysis from a figure like the North America editor and that this was consistent with guidelines.
Alongside Sopel’s reporting, the BBC also reshaped parts of its schedule explicitly around Trump. The Context, a weeknight BBC News programme, began its life in January 2017 as 100 Days, a show designed to follow Trump’s first hundred days from Washington and London. After that milestone it was briefly retitled 100 Days Plus and then relaunched as Beyond 100 Days later in 2017. Jointly anchored by Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London, it focused heavily on the Trump administration, global politics and Brexit, with what the BBC described as irreverent wit and fun. Katty Kay would often open with a summary of the latest twist in Trump world before linking to explainers and panel discussions.
For viewers this created a frame in which the early Trump presidency was treated as an ongoing, slightly surreal drama that required daily decoding. Segments on the travel ban and on early rows with the courts, for example, were often introduced with language that signalled confusion or shock, followed by legal analysis. The tone rarely tipped into overt denunciation, but the basic assumption was that Trump was a disruptive, norm breaking figure who had to be explained against the background of each day’s uproar. In BBC terms, this was still impartial, because it gave airtime to administration defenders and relied on fact based explainers. In effect it made Trump’s unusual behaviour itself the subject of neutral scrutiny. Concrete coverage of key moments shows the pattern. When Trump announced his first travel ban against several Muslim majority countries in January 2017 the BBC quickly produced explainers aimed at a global audience, including a YouTube video titled What does Trump’s travel ban mean for immigrants. It set out which countries were affected, what legal challenges might follow, and whose relatives might be stranded. BBC World Service and BBC World News segments interviewed lawyers and travellers. The dominant frame was practical impact and legal controversy, not moral outrage, although reporters often noted that critics saw the move as discriminatory.
The same combination of straight reporting and contextual critique can be seen in BBC coverage of the family separation policy at the US–Mexico border in 2018. On 20 June 2018, as Trump signed an executive order that he said would end separations while maintaining a hard line on illegal entry, BBC World News America ran a lead segment fronted from Washington that stated simply that President Trump had signed an order ending the policy. Correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan introduced footage from detention centres, interviews with migrant parents and explanation of how the bureaucracy would or would not reunite families. The news text did not call the policy evil, but the choice of scenes, crying children behind fences, parents who did not know where their children were, spoke for themselves. This is typical of BBC television style, where the overt language stays restrained and the moral force is carried by images and sources.
Charlottesville in August 2017, when Trump responded to a white supremacist rally and the killing of Heather Heyer by talking about very fine people on both sides, was another test. Mainstream outlets around the world replayed the press conference in which he reverted to blaming both sides and talked about the alt left, prompting widespread criticism from US politicians. BBC bulletins and web reports followed the same pattern as other major international media. They led on the death and on Trump’s remarks, then quoted Republicans and Democrats who condemned his both sides language. Analysts on Beyond 100 Days and the World Service explained why equating neo Nazis with counter protesters was controversial. The BBC did not run editorials calling Trump a racist, but the structure of the stories made it clear that his position was outside normal presidential response.
That reluctance to label Trump personally intersects with the most important impartiality row of the first term, the Naga Munchetty case in 2019. In July 2019 Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen of colour should go back to the places from which they came. On BBC Breakfast, presenter Naga Munchetty reacted visibly. She said that every time she had been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where she came from it was embedded in racism and that everyone knew what such phrases meant. A viewer complained that she had breached impartiality by expressing an opinion on Trump’s motives. The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit initially upheld the complaint in part, ruling that Munchetty had gone beyond describing the remarks as racist and had imputed motives, which the guidelines discouraged.
The decision sparked a major internal and external backlash. BBC staff wrote to management protesting that you could not be impartial about racism. High profile Black and minority ethnic journalists and actors signed an open letter in the Guardian making the same point. Within days director general Tony Hall personally intervened and overturned the ruling, saying that Munchetty’s words did not merit an upheld complaint.
This episode is vital for understanding how neutrality worked in relation to Trump in the first term. On the one hand it showed that the BBC still applied impartiality rules very tightly even to what many saw as straightforward racism by a sitting president. On the other it revealed that the interpretation of those rules was changing under pressure. Hall’s reversal signalled that calling obviously racist language racist was compatible with due impartiality, and that trying to police this too strictly damaged both staff morale and public trust.
While these internal debates unfolded, Trump remained a staple of BBC foreign coverage. Beyond 100 Days devoted countless segments to his North Korea diplomacy in 2018, including broadcasts from Singapore during the Trump–Kim summit. BBC correspondents explained the historic nature of the meeting, the lack of concrete disarmament commitments and the way the photo opportunities played to Trump’s preference for drama. During the Mueller investigation and the first impeachment over Ukraine, Sopel and colleagues on BBC News channel and Radio 4’s The World Tonight walked audiences through indictments, hearings and votes, with language that stressed process rather than advocacy. They talked about what was alleged, what evidence Mueller had and why Republicans and Democrats took different views, allowing listeners to infer conclusions.
In 2020, as the re election campaign began and then the pandemic hit, the BBC added more explicitly interpretive formats. Americast, a BBC News podcast presented initially by Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel, launched as a 2020 election show. A profile in Air Mail described it as recorded from the US campaign trail, with Maitlis calling a cock up when she saw one and Sopel bringing his veteran correspondent’s perspective. The podcast mixed reporting, chat and interviews with campaign insiders. Clips show the presenters talking candidly about Trump’s debate performances, his attacks on postal voting and the possibility that he would refuse to accept defeat. Americast was still bound by BBC rules, but it was conversational and openly sceptical about some of Trump’s claims.
For critics on the right it became a symbol of BBC anti Trump attitudes, especially because Maitlis had already been attacked by Conservative politicians for a later Newsnight monologue about Dominic Cummings and lockdown rules. For many listeners it functioned as a sharp but fair guide to the chaotic election. At roughly the same time BBC One aired The Trump Show, a four part documentary series about the presidency. Directed by Rob Coldstream, it ran from October 2020 to January 2021. Each episode focused on a phase of Trump’s term, the first year tearing up the rule book, the second year facing challenges from his past, the third facing impeachment, the pandemic and protests, and the final months trying to overturn the election and culminating in what the programme’s own description calls scenes of violent insurrection against Congress. The series drew heavily on interviews with Trump insiders and antagonists, including Omarosa Manigault Newman, Sean Spicer, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, John Bolton and Stormy Daniels. Structurally it was not neutral in the everyday sense. It presented Trump’s presidency as a political horror show driven by egotism and chaos, and reviewers praised it for laying bare his egotism. At the same time it followed a familiar BBC documentary pattern, letting witnesses talk, intercutting clips and using a sober narrator to tie things together. It positioned itself as an inside history rather than a straight polemic.
The final months of the first term, the 2020 election and the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol pushed BBC neutrality to its limits. On election night BBC News and Americast reporting emphasised that counting could take days or weeks and that close states would not be called quickly. As Trump claimed premature victory and began to allege fraud, BBC bulletins repeatedly described his allegations as unsubstantiated or baseless, reflecting the fact that courts were rejecting them. By this point BBC editors clearly felt on solid ground in treating the integrity of the count as a factual matter, not an open partisan question. On 6 January itself the BBC, like others, carried live pictures of crowds on the Capitol steps, then breaking into the building.
In the immediate hours some presenters referred to a riot at the Capitol, while later language hardened into talk of an insurrection. The Trump Show’s fourth episode, broadcast later, explicitly uses the word insurrection and frames the events as the logical climax of Trump’s attempt to overturn the result. Even here the BBC maintained a distinction between calling the event an insurrection, which reflects US legal and congressional usage, and openly calling Trump a criminal, which it generally left to quoted sources.
The pattern across the first term looks something like this, in terms of specific BBC reporters and programmes. Jon Sopel as North America editor, fronting most big White House stories on BBC News, the News at Ten and the World Service. He covered Trump’s rallies, early legislative pushes, foreign summits, the Mueller investigation and impeachment, and he repeatedly stressed that his job was to hold power to account while remaining fair. Katty Kay and Christian Fraser anchoring 100 Days, then 100 Days Plus and Beyond 100 Days, a nightly slot that made the Trump administration a central part of a transatlantic politics show. Newsnight and BBC Breakfast presenters, most notably Naga Munchetty, whose handling of Trump’s racist go back remarks triggered a formal complaint, an initially harsh ruling and then a reversal by the director general. Americast in 2020, presented by Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel, later with Anthony Zurcher, which gave the election a more commentary heavy treatment but still worked within BBC news norms.
The Trump Show documentary series in late 2020 and early 2021, explicitly billed as an inside look at four years of madness, using allies and critics as talking heads. BBC World News America and World Service output, including specific segments on the travel ban, family separation, Charlottesville and other flashpoints, which fed into the global understanding of Trump’s presidency.
Whether this was neutral depends on what you think neutrality means. In a narrow, BBC guideline sense, most of this coverage was impartial. The corporation did not endorse US parties. It invited Republicans as well as Democrats onto its programmes. It repeatedly emphasised that Sopel and others were allowed to analyse but not to editorialise in the sense of telling audiences how to vote. When challenged formally, as in the complaint about Sopel’s free and fair remark or Munchetty’s comments, it treated the guidelines seriously and published reasoned explanations. In a thicker, political sense the picture is more complicated. Several structural features pulled BBC coverage towards a sceptical, often critical view of Trump. First, the BBC’s due impartiality model assumes that some claims can be treated as factual. Once Trump’s statements about crowd sizes, voting fraud or Covid cures had been clearly disproved, BBC journalists felt justified in saying so.
That is not anti Trump bias in a partisan sense, but it does mean that a president who made unusually many false claims would receive unusually frequent on air corrections. Second, the BBC’s own internal culture, shaped by public service values and by a broadly liberal, internationalist worldview, made it instinctively wary of Trump’s nationalism and nativism. That wariness usually came out as tone rather than open advocacy, slight incredulity in a correspondent’s voice, a choice of outraged quote, a decision to pair footage of a speech with graphics showing rising Covid deaths. Critics on the right saw that as systematic anti Trump framing. Critics on the left, interestingly, often thought the BBC still normalised him too much, treating his behaviour as just more politics rather than as a breach of democratic norms.
Third, the impartiality rows around Naga Munchetty and other cases show that the corporation struggled to decide where impartiality ends and basic moral clarity begins. The initial ruling against Munchetty reflected a very strict reading of the rules, which would have required presenters to treat even obvious racism by a head of state in cool, detached tones. The reversal marked a shift towards accepting that some forms of racism and lying are things you can name without breaching due impartiality.
Academic work on BBC impartiality in the Trump and Brexit era tends to support this nuanced view. Studies from the Reuters Institute and others find that while there is no simple evidence of party political bias, coverage is shaped by what counts as reasonable debate in elite circles, and that this can leave audiences without enough context when politics departs sharply from previous norms. That is a good description of how the BBC dealt with Trump. It rarely treated him as a fascist threat or as a heroic disruptor. Instead it placed him inside a frame of institutional conflict and culture war that made sense to its own editors and audiences.
So for the first Trump presidency you could fairly say this. Day to day BBC journalism strove quite hard to meet its formal neutrality obligations and often succeeded. It reported Trump’s actions, gave his supporters a voice and used its analytical formats to explain rather than to campaign. At the same time it was unavoidably shaped by a belief that his presidency was abnormal and often dangerous, which came through in tone, story selection and documentary framing. That tension between procedural impartiality and substantive judgement is precisely what made covering Trump, in Sopel’s own words, the most challenging journalistic assignment he had faced.
In other words, the BBC was neutral in its own terms, focused on due impartiality and a balance of voices, but in the wider political sense its coverage of Trump’s first term was wary, critical and often sceptical, shaped as much by its public service identity as by anything that could be reduced to simple partisan bias.