I find that I have to take exception to Jonathan Freedland’s piece in the Guardian dated 14 November 2025. The section that I find disturbing is as follows:
“…To hold him to account for this dishonesty is to cast yourself as an arbiter of truth, which creates the instant and obvious expectation that you yourself must be truthful. Here, then, is the asymmetry: he can lie, but his critics cannot.
So he can continue to tell the big lie, claiming against all evidence that he won the 2020 election, and myriad smaller lies – he told 60 Minutes that grocery prices “are down” when they are up and that Joe Biden gave Ukraine $350bn in aid when the real figure is well under half that – and, save for a few tireless factcheckers, no one cares. The response is a collective shrug, because it’s Donald Trump. No one expects any better.
The opposite is true of his scrutineers. They have to be fastidious, their evidence impeccable. So when the BBC’s Panorama programme examined Trump’s record ahead of the 2024 election, it had to be right on every detail. As we now know, and for which the BBC has apologised, it was not: it stitched together two statements, made 54 minutes apart, from Trump’s speech ahead of the Capitol Hill riot of 6 January 2021 to create a single, seamless call for violence.
There’s no defence to be made of that. No journalist would argue for the right to be as dishonest as Trump is allowed to be, even though misquoting and manipulating the words of others is a Trump specialism. That path is closed to those who want to criticise Trump for his untruthfulness.
Nor will it do to make the move some have attempted in defence of Panorama, arguing that the programme’s broad thrust was right, even if that specific edit was not. It’s quite true that plenty of 6 January rioters testified that they believed they were doing Trump’s bidding. It’s also true that Trump was impeached, even if eventually acquitted, for his role in inciting those events. But those facts cannot justify a deceptive edit. To say otherwise is to engage in what the US comedian Stephen Colbert famously called “truthiness”, substituting what feels to be true, or what we might want to be true, for what is actually true.
What’s at stake here is not only intellectual and journalistic integrity. It’s also that any slip is a gift to Trump and a setback to what, portentously, we might call the cause of truth – not in some high-blown, abstract sense, but very practically. Note the White House press secretary’s denunciation of the BBC as “100% fake news” and a “propaganda machine”. Mark those words, because they will be used again. Next time the BBC accurately exposes a Trump misdeed, or even asks a tough question, he and his allies will recall the Panorama edit and insist that whatever the BBC says can be safely ignored…”
What I find disturbing is the slightly holier than thou aspect of the view he refers to as ‘truthiness’. I have highlighted the paragraph in question. I disagree entirely in that there is nothing deceptive about the truth. The truth is that Mr Trump incited a riot and continues to lie about it. It is he who manipulates reality on a daily basis. The idea that there is ‘no defence to be made of the edit’ is absurd sophistry. What possible deception can there be in telling the truth? There was no misquoting. The clip shows Mr Trump using provocative words to incite his followers. Whether they came immediately after, before or later than a previous comment, in this case, matters not one jot with what amounts to a criminal offence. Although Mr Trump may have been ‘acquitted’ by the Senate, it was entirely along political party lines. Even those Republicans who knew him to be guilty, and who said so at the time, immediately after the riot and before the impeachment, voted against the impeachment.
It doesn’t work like that in a court of law. It is no defence to say ‘I said I didn’t intend to commit the crime before I did it, so I should be let off”. In every court of law, where Mr Trump has actually appeared, he has been found guilty by juries of his peers. Ordinary citizens have not believed his protestations of innocence. Only his supporters, acolytes and sycophants have backed him up, even whilst knowing full well the extent of his deceptions. To hold journalist and critics to account on the basis of what I would call manufactured fantasy integrity is not helpful. I would, in fact, call is self-deception. Truth is truth. there is no question of arbitration. In this instance there was no question of wishing something to be true, or substituting what was felt to be true. There was no deception of any kind but merely stating fact. The facts were examined by, and reported in, the Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection. Mr Tumps intentions were clear. to cause disruption by any means necessary and 'fight like hell'. The BBC should not have apologised nor should anyone shy away from truth on the basis of some imagined high moral tone. It does not sit well. I suggest Mr Freedland, who I very much admire, rethink his notions of journalistic and intellectual integrity, They should be high but not beyond truth.
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