Donald Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1bn (£760m) – but this is not his first legal battle with the media.
The US president has clashed with the broadcaster over edits made to one of his 2021 speeches in a Panorama documentary aired before last year’s election.
Mr Trump’s legal team has accused the BBC of using “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements”.
BBC Chair Samir Shah has apologised for an “error of judgment” over the way the speech was edited, while director-general, Tim Davie, and CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have both announced their resignations.
But this is not the first time Mr Trump has taken on the media – and is in fact the latest in a recent spate of legal battles with the press.
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Trump vs CNN
If past examples are anything to go by, Mr Trump’s legal threat is not an empty one.
He previously filed a $475m (£360m) defamation suit against CNN, alleging it had compared him to Adolf Hitler.
It came after CNN referred to Mr Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him as the “Big Lie” – an expression also used by Hitler in Mein Kampf.
But the case was thrown out after US district judge Raag Singhal ruled that the term “does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews”.
Election campaign lawsuit
His election campaign in 2020 also sued the New York Times and the Washington Post over opinion pieces alleging ties between with Russia.
These cases were dismissed in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
Yet, Mr Trump has had more success in recent years.
ABC settlement
In 2024, Trump sued American broadcaster ABC and its news host George Stephanopoulos, after the anchor falsely referred to the president being found “liable for rape” in an interview.
In the civil case in question, he was actually found liable for sexual abuse and defamation – a verdict which Trump is appealing.
Given the high bar for proving defamation against public figures, experts were sceptical that he could win the lawsuit.
George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center told CBS at the time: “I don’t know of any president who successfully sued a media company for defamation.”
Yet ABC, which is owned by Disney, agreed to settle, paying $15m (£11.4m) to Trump for his future presidential library, and a further $1m (£760,000) towards his legal fees.
Battle with CBS
In another lawsuit, the president demanded $20bn (£15.2bn) from CBS over an interview with his election rival Kamala Harris broadcast on 60 Minutes.
His team accused the broadcaster of “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” with its editing of the interview, saying it intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in the contest.
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First Amendment attorney Charles Tobin of the law firm Ballard Spahr told CNN at the time: “This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”
Yet they too settled out of court, with CBS’ parent company, Paramount Global, paying $16m (£12.1m) to end the legal dispute – again towards Trump’s future presidential library.
Trump vs Meta
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also settled with the president to the tune of $25m (£19m).
That lawsuit came after he sued over the suspension of his accounts in the wake of the 6 January riots.
Why the recent spate?
While Mr Trump has made several threats to media organisations in recent years, it is not the first time he has done so.
According to Columbia Journalism Review, he threatened to sue a journalist at New York’s Village Voice as far back as 1979, and actually sued the Chicago Tribune in 1984.
That 1984 lawsuit, which came after Mr Trump took umbrage at a column by the paper’s award-winning architecture columnist criticising his plans for a huge tower block in New York City, was thrown out as an opinion by a judge.
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However, the number of lawsuits, and the size of his compensation demands, have increased of late. So what has changed?
“As president, Trump’s leverage has increased exponentially,” wrote media reporter Paul Farhi in Vanity Fair.
“It’s no coincidence that Disney and Meta have settled since Election Day, and Paramount has come to the table.”
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Now that he’s turning his ire on the BBC, what will the outcome be?
Mr Freeman called his threat to the broadcaster “totally meaningless”, noting that he “has a long record of unsuccessful libel suits” intended to “threaten and scare media he doesn’t like”.
Can the BBC rely on that assessment?
With a deadline set for Friday, 10pm UK time, we may be about to find out.
