As President Trump prepares to sue the BBC for deceptively editing his words on January 6, 2021, to make it appear like he urged violence, PBS’s Christiane Amanpour said on her Friday podcast, The Ex Files, that the idea that the BBC is biased is “probably wrong” and that her own network is “an absolute must” have for the American people.
On the supposed necessity of public media, Amanpour claimed that there “is such a desperate need for that. You need something that is not left, right, or corporatist, you know, owned by a corporate entity. The truth is that in the U.K., the BBC is one of the most powerful and editorially and culturally significant content providers.”
Amanpour’s ode to the BBC continued, “It does politics from one end of the spectrum to the other. It does sports, entertainment. All of that. David Attenborough, you know, the great naturalist who brought everybody the world and made the world fall in love with wildlife. Thank you to the BBC. So, I do think that one has to be super careful. Why not just, you know, say when you're wrong, make a correction, but the idea of institutional bias at the BBC, I think, is probably wrong.”
In 2025, you do not need a public broadcasting network to get sports and entertainment. Still, Amanpour then hedged, “Although, I will say that they have been incredibly under fire as well for a lot of things in the last several years, including the coverage of the Israeli-Gaza War. And a lot of people here were very upset about the amount of weight that was given to one side, you know, versus the other side.”
That’s putting it lightly. The BBC’s Israel/Gaza coverage has been one journalistic scandal after another.
Turning back stateside, Amanpour pretended that it is actually conservatives who most appreciate public broadcasting, “I think in the United States public broadcasting also is an absolute must. And so to see the Corporation for Public Broadcasting be, you know, dismantled. To see the pressure against PBS and NPR when these are not servicing left-wing communities. These, and nor is the BBC, they service the entire country and often are most appreciated in some of the areas that actually tend to vote conservative and are not as serviced and satisfied and catered to by a lot of the other media.”
According to polls, 32 percent of Democrats claim to regularly get news from NPR compared to only 9 percent of Republicans. For PBS, it is 31 and 11 percent, respectively. The reason for the discrepancy is obvious. Despite Amanpour’s claim that public broadcasting is on neither the left nor the right, it is clear that is not true.
Here is a transcript for the November 13 show:
Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
11/14/2025
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And I think the second part of the, you know, of second part of the question is public broadcasting. It is such a desperate need for that. You need something that is not left, right, or corporatist, you know, owned by a corporate entity. The truth is that in the U.K., the BBC is one of the most powerful and editorially and culturally significant content providers.
I hate using that word but it does films. It does, you know, all sorts of cultural programs. It does politics from one end of the spectrum to the other. It does sports, entertainment. All of that. David Attenborough, you know, the great naturalist who brought everybody the world and made the world fall in love with wildlife. Thank you to the BBC. So, I do think that one has to be super careful. Why not just, you know, say when you're wrong, make a correction, but the idea of institutional bias that the BBC, I think, is probably wrong.
Although, I will say that they have been incredibly under fire as well for a lot of things in the last several years, including the coverage of the Israeli-Gaza War. And a lot of people here were very upset about the amount of weight that was given to one side, you know, versus the other side.
I think in the United States public broadcasting also is an absolute must. And so to see the Corporation for Public Broadcasting be, you know, dismantled. To see the pressure against PBS and NPR when these are not servicing left-wing communities. These, and nor is the BBC, they service the entire country and often are most appreciated in some of the areas that actually tend to vote conservative and are not as serviced and satisfied and catered to by a lot of the other media.
