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The Media Research Center has long hated the BBC for failing to be a right-wing pro-Trump shill. For instance:

When the BBC got into some serious trouble with Trump, the MRC couldn’t have been happier. Jorge Bonilla cheered in a Nov. 9 post:

After much controversy over the doctoring of a portion of President Donald Trump’s remarks at The Ellipse on January 6th, 2021, it has been announced today that both the Director General and News CEO of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have resigned.

Curiously, Bonilla didn’t actually document what the BBC did wrong, nor did it explain, like WorldNetDaily similarly failed to do, describe the proper context of Trump’s “fight like hell” statement during that speech. Instead, he lashed out at frequent MRC target Brian Stelter for reporting on it:

Quite unusual,” Stelter says. Of course, Stelter tries to make the resignations about everything else, from “dramas or comedies” to coverage of the war in Gaza. But this wasn’t about any of that. It was solely about selectively and deliberately editing a speech in order to suit a narrative. Stelter’s attempt to muddy the waters is simply shameful.
Unfortunately, it is quite unusual for news bosses stateside to resign after they’ve been caught spreading any of a litany of hoaxes: Russia, Very Fine People, Drinking Bleach, Elon Nazi Salute, among a legion of others. While it appears that there remains a modicum of British reserve and elegance compelling immediate resignation when caught spreading fake news, such decorum does not exist stateside. Media lie and move on to the next hoax when caught.

Bonillla offered no evidence that Trump did not say “fight like hell” as an incitement for his followers.

The next day, P.J. Gladnick whined that another media outlet wouldn’t stick to his preferred narrative:

So how did Politico cover this scandal? By treading lightly on the details while emphasizing that “the latest crisis marks a significant escalation in attacks on the BBC from the right.”
In addition, strongly implied that the Trump administration’s reaction to the BBC scandal displayed unseemly hubris as you can see in the title of their Sunday story by Matt Honeycombe-Foster, “Trump gloats as BBC boss quits over coverage ‘mistakes’.”
[…]
And, according to Politico, it was not only Trump who supposedly acted poorly but also White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt who had the gall to have not only “seized” (but not pounced?) on the scandal but compounded the grievous breach of liberal etiquette because she “appeared jubilant.”

Gladnick did not dispute that analysis. Tim Graham then went after Stelter again:

Leftists like CNN’s chief media analyst Brian Stelter feel terrible about two top executives at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) tendering their resignations over a really bad edit of Donald Trump’s speech to supporters on January 6, 2021. Those right-wingers are ruining things again by focusing on aggressive media mangling of the facts.
In a video on X, Stelter lamented that this edit shouldn’t have forced resignations, but the BBC “exists in an incredibly politically charged environment, even as it tries to be apolitical and impartial.” Wrong. Nobody believes they’re “trying” to be apolitical. They want to be perceived as impartial even as they’re extremely partial.
As Stelter notes, the BBC has faced relentless criticism over its relentless bias against Israel and in favor of Hamas in its reporting from Gaza.
Last year, after a study found the BBC overwhelmingly favored Hamas spin after the attacks of October 7, BBC’s Jeremy Bowen claimed “Searching for some kind of spurious balance is entirely wrong, the truth is the objective.”

We’ve documented how the study, which made heavy use of the kind of artificial intelligence the MRC normally disdains, was found to be highly flawed with a researcher bringing a pro-Israel bias to the project. But it gave Graham the right kind of headline he can exploit, so he will stick with that narrative. He went on to grumble:

The lefties are also concerned about the re-evaluation of the BBC’s license-fee system of funding “public” media. British households pay £174.50 ($230) a year for BBC shows and services, which leads to conservative complaints about involuntarily supporting anti-conservative media.
No one probably fears for the BBC under a Labour Party government, but the BBC’s brand is definitely struggling, just like aggressive bias caused a funding problem for PBS and NPR.

Graham offered no evidence of the “aggressive bias” he claims exists at the BBC, NPR or PBS.

Jorge Bonilla huffed in a Nov. 11 post that non-right-wing media didn’t cover the story and that CBS did only a 20-second brief on it:

The Elitist Media seem to have been made very uncomfortable by the recent resignations of two BBC executives, after outrage over a documentary that aired manipulated video of President Donald Trump’s speech at The Ellipse on January 6th, 2021. So much so, that they barely covered the scandal, if at all.
The only network evening newscast to cover the scandal was the CBS Evening News. To be clear, “cover” is doing a herculean lift here.
[…]
You will notice that the brief is framed around President Trump’s litigation threat and demand for retraction, respectively. But there is nothing between those frames to enlighten the viewer as to why Trump might want to sue or demand a retraction.
Likewise, there is no insight as to HOW the documentary suggested that Trump called for violence on January 6th, which is patently false.
[…]
President Trump’s full quote was that he would walk with supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” But the BBC’s segment made the president “‘Say’ things [he] never actually said,” by editing together footage from the start of the speech with a separate quote nearly an hour later, according to the leaked dossier.
None of that made it to the CBS Evening News. CBS’s brief was a classic Trumpwash: when Donald Trump’s reaction to a scandal is reported as the actual scandal, thus giving Elitist Media outlets the cover to omit the details that made the scandal a scandal in the first place.

But Bonilla is trying to pretend that Trump never told his audience to “fight like hell” or put it in the context he demands that other statements be put into.

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Tim Graham spent part of his Nov. 11 podcast raging at the “fraudulent editing of Donald Trump’s speech to supporters on January 6, 2021 — not to mention the BBC’s horribly pro-Hamas coverage of the war in Gaza.” We’ve documented how that Gaza study, which made heavy use of the kind of artificial intelligence the MRC normally disdains, was found to be highly flawed with a researcher bringing a pro-Israel bias to the project.

Alex Christy complained in a Nov. 15 post:

As President Trump prepares to sue the BBC for deceptively editing his words on January 6, 2021, to make it appear like he urged violence, PBS’s Christiane Amanpour said on her Friday podcast, The Ex Files, that the idea that the BBC is biased is “probably wrong” and that her own network is “an absolute must” have for the American people.
[…]
Amanpour’s ode to the BBC continued, “It does politics from one end of the spectrum to the other. It does sports, entertainment. All of that. David Attenborough, you know, the great naturalist who brought everybody the world and made the world fall in love with wildlife. Thank you to the BBC. So, I do think that one has to be super careful. Why not just, you know, say when you’re wrong, make a correction, but the idea of institutional bias at the BBC, I think, is probably wrong.”
In 2025, you do not need a public broadcasting network to get sports and entertainment.

Christy also hauled out the bogus study of the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza, insisting it was “one journalistic scandal after another.”

The same day, Jeffrey Lord spent a column insisting that “a ‘stunt’ is decidedly not what Trump is about” — has he never observed Trump in action? — before lecturing:

There is a reason that in today’s world news outlets from Newsmax to Fox News to so many conservative others, both in print and broadcast form, exist in the first place.
And that reason is simply that as more and more Americans of the long ago began to wake up to the fact that the nation’s major newspapers and television news outlets – The New York Times, Washington Post and the major television broadcast networks of the day (among others) were decidedly not straight “just the facts” journalism as they were advertised to be.
Will Trump’s taking on the BBC set some sort of a pattern of caution down the media road for theoretically non-partisan outlets to actually live up to their self-appointed image as non-partisan “just the facts” journalism?
Who knows? But the very fact that Trump has set this type of response in motion by legally taking on the BBC with his potential BBC lawsuit is something new.
Stay tuned.

We won’t bother to stay tuned whether Lord puts Trump’s “fight like hell” remark in its proper context.

The MRC continued to whine about the BBC editing a speech by Donald Trump in a Nov. 20 post by Tom Olohan:

President Donald Trump promised to sue the BBC for its deceptive edits to one of his speeches. But that was not enough for Big Tech companies to axe the outlet from their AI training data sets.
The BBC edited video suggesting that the President supported violence during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots. But instead of this deception disqualifying the outlet from being used as a source in AI responses, Meta AI and xAI’s Grok actually praised the BBC and doubled down on using it.
Meta AI offered a particularly egregious response, noting that since the chatbot is “built to surface the most reliable reporting and note any corrections, I’ll keep using BBC material when it’s relevant.” Grok also refused to cease using the BBC, praising the biased publication as “one of the most comprehensive and fact-checked broadcasters globally.” OpenAI’s ChatGPT also suggested that it would continue using the BBC.
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider denounced these Big Tech platforms for these outrageous statements. “Even when elitist media get caught dead to rights spreading fake narratives for partisan purposes, Big Tech will still use them and openly call them more reliable than the right-of-center sources they suppress,” Schneider said. “And if companies like Meta are so committed to keep pouring garbage from the BBC into their chatbots, they’re going to keep shoveling garbage out to their users.”

Unlike his fellow MRC employees, Olohan did admit that Trump said “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore,” but he didn’t explain the context of that remark. but he also whined that AI engines wouldn’t give the incident the attention he thought it deserved:

Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini both acknowledged the incident, but downplayed it. Each also claimed that they (as chatbots) could not independently choose to stop using a source. Additionally, neither explicitly acknowledged that they trained on the BBC.
Notably, Claude took issue with the idea that the BBC was “authoring misinformation” and tried to downplay the scandal. Trump administration AI Czar David Sacks warned that Claude’s parent company, Anthropic, was likely to create products with a strong woke bias.
Sacks criticized Anthropic for hiring “the Biden AI team” in response to comments from leftist tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, who is a partner at a firm that has invested in Anthropic. Hoffman had claimed that Anthropic was “one of the good guys” among AI companies in a tweet thread that appeared to target Musk’s Grok and praised OpenAI.

When Trump finally did sue the BBC, Tim Graham cheered it on in a Dec. 16 post:

Fox News media reporters Brian Flood and Joseph Wulfsohn reported President Donald Trump filed a “monster $10 billion lawsuit” on Monday against the taxpayer-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for its 2024 “Panorama” documentary that blatantly distorted his comments on January 6, 2021 – merging together comments that were made nearly an hour apart, making him appear he was calling for violence at the Capitol.
“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol. And I’ll be there with you. And we fight — we fight like hell,” the documentary showed Trump saying.
In reality, Trump said, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol. And we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
It wasn’t until 54 minutes later that Trump called on his supporters to “fight like hell” for an accurate vote count.

Actually, Trump said nothing about an “accurate vote count” in making that remark, or explain why that remark did not justify how the BBC covered the speech. Instead, he continued to rant:

The mangled quote, which blew up in the British press, led to the resignations of BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and BBC director-general Tim Davie, and then a panic over the sinking brand.
The lefties are also concerned about the re-evaluation of the BBC’s license-fee system of funding “public” media. British households pay £174.50 ($230) a year for BBC shows and services, which leads to conservative complaints about involuntarily supporting anti-conservative media.
Former UK prime minister Liz Truss wrote at the time the scandal erupted: “I’m glad the US President and the rest of the world are seeing the BBC for what it is. Its failure to tell the truth on everything from transgender ideology to economics to Gaza has done huge damage to politics and government in this country. This should be the end of nationalised broadcasting.”

Graham gave no reason why anyone should listen to Truss given her failed month-long tenure as prime minister and her support of far-right activists like Tommy Robinson.

Thje MRC’s nepo-baby leader went on a right-wing channel to tout the lawsuit, as described in a Dec. 19 post:

In a hard-hitting segment on Newsmax’s The Chris Salcedo Show Tuesday night, Media Research Center (MRC) President David Bozell joined host Chris Salcedo to break down President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC. Bozell also weighed in on what some are calling a Vanity Fair “hit piece” on the Trump leadership team.
Trump’s BBC lawsuit stems from the state-owned media’s deceptive editing of his January 6, 2021, speech in a Panorama documentary. By splicing comments made nearly an hour apart—omitting Trump’s calls for peace—the BBC falsely portrayed him as inciting violence.
Salcedo kicked off by noting Trump’s prior victories in similar cases against CBS and ABC, asking how the President might fare against a taxpayer-funded giant like the BBC. Bozell was optimistic: “I think it’s kind of slim to none” for the BBC to win. “The video is pretty apparent. They spliced Trump’s commentary one hour apart on J6… How can you defend that? Like saying, ‘oops’?”

Rather than admit that Trump toled his followers to “fight like hell,” let alone explain the context of that remark, the post went on to claim that “Bozell’s appearance underscored the MRC’s watchdog role in holding the media accountable, predicting strong odds for Trump while warning conservatives about the perils of an elitist press corps that fundamentally doesn’t like conservatives.” It wasn’t mention that the MRC won’t hold conservatives to the same “watchdog role.”

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The MRC Helps Trump Take On The BBC

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