BBC should pay nothing to Trump, former director general says

The BBC should never agree to pay any money to Donald Trump, former director general Lord Tony Hall has said.

The corporation has apologised to the US President for a Panorama episode that spliced parts of his 6 January 2021 speech together, but rejected his demands for compensation.

Since the corporation's retraction, Trump has indicated he may continue legal action, upping the amount he could sue for to between $1bn (£759m) and $5bn.

Asked if he could ever conceive of licence fee payers' money being used to pay Trump off, Lord Hall told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: "No, [it] should not happen. You're talking about public money. It would not be appropriate."

Lord Hall stepped down as director general in 2020 after seven years in the role.

Controversy around how Trump's speech was edited has led to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness.

The video edit was a "serious error", Lord Hall told the BBC, adding that it should have "been recognised as such much earlier in the whole process".

Lord Hall also said he worried that the "hard work, diligence and the belief in impartiality" of BBC journalists had been lost in the debate.

The resignation of two senior figures at the start of the BBC's charter renewal makes the process more difficult "at a crucial time for its future", he added.

On Thursday evening, the BBC published a statement on its Corrections and Clarifications page in which it said the Panorama programme, which was only broadcast on 28 October 2024, had been reviewed after criticism of how Trump's speech had been edited.

"We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action," the statement said.

Lawyers for the BBC have written to Trump's legal team, a BBC spokesperson said this week.

But in an interview with GB News on Saturday, Trump said he had an "obligation" to sue the BBC, adding: "If you don't do it, you don't stop it from happening again with other people."

He called the edit "egregious" and "worse than the Kamala thing", a reference to a dispute he had with US news outlet CBS over an interview on the 60 Minutes programme with his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.