The BBC risks making more mistakes than necessary, nervous about the comparison with Donald Trump. The public body censored the speech of the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, famous throughout the world for his proposal for a universal basic income or shortened working day, the phrase in which he referred to Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in the history of the United States”. The intellectual accused the British public body of “cowardice”.
Bregman had been invited to give the famous Reicht Lectures (Reicht’s lecturesin the original in English), an annual event in which a relevant personality in his field presents a summary of his ideas, proposals or thoughts to an audience. The sessions are subsequently broadcast by the BBC.
The historian assures that Radio 4, a public broadcaster, changed his speech and deleted the controversial phrase. “The phrase was removed from my commissioned lecture, revised through an entire editorial process and recorded four weeks ago in front of the BBC Radio Theater auditorium, in front of 500 people. I was informed that the decision had been imposed at the highest levels of the company,” the historian explained.
This comes after the public body apologized to the President of the United States for the mistake made in a documentary broadcast a year ago, in which a speech by the president on the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was misleadingly edited, but the body refuses to compensate him financially for the error.
The crisis that erupted ended up causing the resignation of the entity’s general manager, Tim Davie, and the head of the News Division, Deborah Turness. The American president has insisted on asking the chain for compensation that could range between 1,000 and 5,000 million dollars (860 and 4,600 million euros).
The episode is even more serious if we take into account that the central theme of Bregman’s speech was precisely the denunciation of the “paralyzing cowardice” of many elites (universities or media) in the face of the advance of authoritarianism in the world.
“Self-censorship caused by fear should worry us all,” lamented the author, praising BBC journalists and producers. “I decided to share this information in the hope that transparency will help strengthen, not weaken, our democratic culture,” he explained.
The network, according to the historian, explained that American lawyers had reviewed the text. Last Monday he was informed of the deletion of the controversial phrase. The Reicht Lectures are broadcast in the United States via the BBC’s international service.
“All our programs must comply with BBC editorial standards and we have decided to remove this sentence on legal advice,” a spokesperson for the British public broadcaster said.
Bregman became famous for a speech given in 2019 at the Davos Forum in which he denounced the phenomenon of tax evasion to those present. The conference commissioned by the BBC was entitled Moral revolution.
Trump, who has turned politics into a game of negotiation and a power duel, has used the same technique, threatening him with multimillion-dollar lawsuits, against any media, law firms or academic institutions that annoy or criticize him. Some, such as ABC or CBS networks, have decided to pay large sums of compensation in out-of-court settlements, to ease the pressure.
