‘Don’t pay Trump’, Lord Hall urges BBC

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 speech on January 6, 2021, together but has rejected his compensation demands.

Trump has said he may continue legal action, upping the amount he could sue for, to between $1bn (£759m) and $5bn.

Lord Hall, who lives in Henley, told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that compensation should not be paid.

“You’re talking about public money,” he said. “It would not be appropriate.”

Lord Hall stepped down as director-general in 2020 after seven years in the role to be replaced by Tim Davie who himself resigned in the wake of the controversy over Trump’s speech, along with head of news Deborah Turness.

The video edit was a “serious error”, Lord Hall said, 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.

On Thursday last week, the BBC published a statement in which it said the Panorama programme, which was broadcast October 28, 2024, had been reviewed after criticism of how Trump’s speech had been edited.

It said: “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.”

Lawyers for the BBC have written to Trump’s legal team.

The President has said that 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”.