By Musa Mdluli

MBABANE:Tim Davie, the outgoing Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC) says the United Kingdom’s public broadcaster will not be defined by its “enemies”, Aljazeera reported on Wednesday.

This comes as the BBC faces a public relations, leadership crisis and legal threats from United States President Donald Trump.

But in a call with staff on Tuesday, the BBC’s Director-General said he was “fiercely proud” of the publicly-funded broadcaster, even as he acknowledged that it had made mistakes.

“We will thrive, and this narrative will not just be given by our enemies. It’s our narrative,” Davie said.

Davie said the BBC needed to defend its work in the face of mounting attacks on the media.

“I think we have to fight for our journalism. There are difficult times it goes through, but it just does good work. And that speaks-it speaks louder than any newspaper, any weaponisation. We are the very best of what I think we should be as a society,” he said.

But Davie’s comments come as the BBC grapples with accusations of bias following the leak of an internal memo that accused producers of making misleading edits to footage of Trump’s speech before the January 6, 2021, riot at the United States Capitol.

Trump has threatened to sue the BBC over the edited footage aired in the Panorama documentary Trump: A Second Chance?, by Friday, unless the broadcaster provides a “full and fair” retraction and compensation.

BBC Executives have acknowledged that the footage, which appeared to show Trump directly encouraging the attack on the US Capitol, was misleading, but have rejected claims of systemic bias.