The Media Research Center 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.”