BBC lectured on political bias... by Newsmax

Revelling in full-on self-flagellation mode, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme turned to Chris Ruddy, founder and chief executive of right wing US cable TV firm Newsmax, on Tuesday for his take on Donald Trump’s billion-dollar lawsuit threat against the corporation.

“I have no doubt the BBC misrepresented what the president said, and that’s pretty clear,” said Ruddy of the controversial Panorama edit. “I think everybody agrees, otherwise you wouldn’t have had those resignations. He sees this as legitimising his claims that there’s fake news, that the news is out to get him.

Tuddy continued of his own organisation: “We do give both sides about him and his policies. We certainly wouldn’t edit a video clip about him or even President Biden or anyone.

“As you know there’s a lot of criticism of the BBC that’s gone on about bias, not just here in the United States, not just Britain, around the world, and it’s increasingly true of American media they’ve become politicised, and I think it’s a wake-up call that they not go to excess.”

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Indeed, Newsmax – so slavishly pro-Trump in its coverage it makes Fox News look balanced – may not edit a video clip of the president. But time constraints, alas, meant Ruddy couldn’t be questioned on its own dubious record on veracity.

Earlier this year it was forced to pay a whopping $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of libelling a voting equipment company by spreading lies about Trump’s 2020 election loss. Delaware superior court judge Eric Davis ruled that Newsmax defamed Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems by airing false information about the company and its equipment.

Awkwardly, that ruling came just two years after Newsmax paid what court papers describe as $40 million to settle another, separate libel lawsuit from a different voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which also was a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories on the network.

Internal correspondence from Newsmax officials likewise shows they knew the claims were baseless. “How long are we going to play along with election fraud?,” Newsmax host Bob Sellers said two days after the 2020 election was called for Biden, according to internal documents revealed as part of the case.

Ruddy is just the man to be pontificating on media bias, then – just as the hairshirt-wearing Beeb decided that on Sunday night, the right man to get on the airwaves and attack their journalistic ethics was tabloid dinosaur Kelvin “The Truth” MacKenzie.