Danni Scott
Published November 25, 2025 5:30pm
Updated November 25, 2025 5:30pm
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Rutger Bregman has called out the BBC for censorship (Picture: Paco Freire/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The BBC and historian Rutger Bregman have clashed over the removal of a line from his lecture, which he has called ‘censorship’.
In his Reith Lecture, A Time Of Monsters, the author described Donald Trump as ‘the most openly corrupt president in American history’.
This was removed from the Radio 4 broadcast, which aired at 9am on Tuesday, which the BBC said had been done on ‘legal advice’.
It comes after Donald Trump threatened the BBC with a billion-dollar lawsuit over the editing of his speech in a Panorama episode from 2024.
Bregman took to his social media to share the ‘disappointing’ news a month after he delivered his lecture to a live audience in London.
‘Honestly, I wish this wasn’t true, but the BBC has decided to censor the opening lecture of a series they invited me to give,’ he wrote on Bluesky.
He called US President Donald Trump the ‘most openly corrupt president’ (Picture: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The author continued: ‘They deleted the sentence in which I described Donald Trump as the most openly corrupt president in American history. That line is gone.
‘It has been removed from the version broadcast this morning on BBC Radio 4.’
Bregman explained that he had been contacted by the BBC to let him know the sentence was being ‘discussed with US lawyers and at the highest levels’ inside the broadcaster.
‘For days, they couldn’t give me an answer,’ he continued. ‘Yesterday they finally did, and the irony could not be bigger, because this lecture, titled A Time Of Monsters, is exactly about the cowardice of today’s elites, about universities, corporations, and yes, media networks, bending the knee to authoritarianism.
‘I find it hard to express how shocked I am at the BBC’s decision.’
The Reith Lectures have been going for more than 75 years with Bregman claiming they are about ‘free expression’.
Bregman called it ‘very serious’ and ‘censorship’ from the BBC (Picture: Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images)
They invite a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio about significant issues of the day.
Named after the first director general of the BBC, Reith lecturers have included Stephen Hawking, Dame Hilary Mantel and J Robert Oppenheimer.
He said the removed sentence was ‘defensible and plausible’, adding that a major investigation in the New Yorker said that ‘the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the presidency has become commonplace’.
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‘This decision by the leadership of the BBC is very serious,’ he said. ‘It isn’t even about me. It’s about something much bigger.
‘When institutions start censoring themselves because they’re scared of those in power, that is the moment we all need to pay attention.
‘Democracies don’t collapse overnight. They gradually erode in acts of fear.’
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A BBC spokesperson said: ”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.’
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