Author Condemns BBC Over 'Censored' Reith Lecture
The BBC is facing serious accusations of censorship from prominent author and historian Rutger Bregman. The dispute centres on the corporation's decision to remove a specific line about former US President Donald Trump from Bregman's pre-recorded Reith Lecture, which aired on BBC Radio 4.
The deleted sentence described Donald Trump as "the most openly corrupt president in American history". While the lecture was delivered in full to a live London audience in October, this particular remark was absent from the broadcast on Tuesday morning.
A Clash of Principles and Legal Fears
Mr Bregman, a 37-year-old Dutch academic famous for his book Utopia For Realists, expressed his profound disappointment on social media. He revealed that he was informed just days before the broadcast that the sentence was being scrutinised by US lawyers and senior BBC executives.
He stated, "I find it hard to express how shocked I am at the BBC’s decision", adding that the irony was stark. His lecture, titled 'A Time Of Monsters', critically examines what he calls the cowardice of modern elites, including media networks that bend to authoritarianism.
The author defended his removed statement, asserting it was "defensible and plausible" and pointing to a major New Yorker investigation from August that detailed Trump's potential personal financial gains from his presidency.
BBC Cites Legal Advice Amid Broader Trump Dispute
In its defence, a BBC spokesperson stated, "All of our programmes are required to comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, and we made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice."
This controversy emerges against a tense backdrop. The corporation is currently dealing with a separate legal threat from Donald Trump himself. The former president has threatened a billion-dollar lawsuit against the BBC concerning a 2024 Panorama episode that edited his 6 January 2021 speech, which the BBC's own chairman, Samir Shah, admitted gave "the impression of a direct call for violent action".
A Warning for Democratic Freedoms
Mr Bregman framed the BBC's action as a symptom of a larger, more dangerous trend. He warned that when major institutions begin to censor themselves out of fear of the powerful, it represents a significant erosion of democratic norms.
"Democracies don’t collapse overnight," he cautioned. "They gradually erode in acts of fear." He emphasised that the Reith Lectures, running for over 75 years and named after the BBC's first director-general, are fundamentally about free expression, making this act of censorship particularly concerning for everyone.
