British Media Puts American Media to Shame with Longest Reel of Untruths Trump Fact-check

It’s titled: Trump v the Truth, and sadly, this highlights the lack of rigorous fact-checking of the Trump regime from U.S. media.

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This is a lot awesome and a little awkward.

In honor of President Trump’s visit to the UK, Britain’s Channel 4 News will run what they describe as the “longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television.”

It’s titled: Trump v the Truth, and sadly, this highlights the lack of rigorous fact-checking of the Trump regime from U.S. media.

The show will feature an uninterrupted, several-hours-long broadcast of over 100 of Trump's false or misleading statements, with accompanying fact-checks as a way to welcome Trump’s second state visit to Britain.

It even includes a little something many of us have been asking U.S. media to include in their coverage: brief, text-based fact-checks.

Ahhh, so it is possible.

“The British channel has vowed to put a spotlight on his ‘prolific oeuvre of untruths,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote. They added Channel 4’s chief content officer Ian Katz’s statement:

“Donald J Trump loves making history. So, on Wednesday Channel 4 will do just that: we’ll show what we believe to be the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television. We hope it will remind viewers how disorientating and dangerous the world becomes when the most powerful man on earth shows little regard for the truth. And if President Trump cares to watch along after the state banquet, he may even clear up a few misconceptions.”

It will air at 10 AM local time Sep. 17.

But wait. That’s not all. They’re making an entire day of it.

Yes, they’re using Trump and his attacks on the media to make a poignant point at this time of crisis for media companies. So, a Trump impersonator will take over to “deliver false information ‘as a sobering reminder of what can happen when once-trusted sources of truth cannot be relied upon.’”

Then there will be a second episode of The Donald Trump Show, which will use news footage from TV, podcasts and social media “to tell the story of the last nine months of the presidency as an unfolding soap opera.”

From afar, the Trump presidency looks like one badly written soap opera. Living through it is more of a wartime experience.

CONTRAST With US Media

Meanwhile, over here in the United States of America where “freedom rings”, this president has attacked, undermined and co-opted the media to operate closer to Russia state TV than independent news.

Media companies in the U.S. have capitulated to Donald Trump in various ways, often following public legal and political pressure from him and his allies. Concerns from critics have focused on the media's handling of Trump's tactics, which include repeated legal threats and lawsuits, manipulation of access, and rhetoric designed to delegitimize news organizations.

Here are several instances of media capitulation to Donald Trump:

Financial settlements and political deals:

• Media company settlements: Major outlets like ABC News and Paramount (the parent company of CBS News) settled multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits with Trump, even though legal experts suggested they had strong defenses. Some settlements included significant payments earmarked for Trump's presidential library.

• Corporate interests and media owners: Billionaires who own media companies, such as Jeff Bezos (owner of the Washington Post), have capitulated seemingly to avoid business conflicts with the administration. Reports claim that Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong (Los Angeles Times owner) blocked their newspapers' endorsements of Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, potentially to curry favor with a potential Trump administration.

• FCC leverage: The Trump administration has used its influence with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to pressure media outlets. For example, Paramount settled a lawsuit and scaled back diversity initiatives while seeking FCC approval for a merger.

Political and editorial influence:

• Neutralizing critical coverage: Following the settlements, media critics and observers of authoritarianism have expressed concern that news organizations were yielding to pressure and backing away from critical reporting on Trump. The appointment of Kenneth Weinstein, a conservative with ties to Trump, to an oversight position as Ombudsman at Paramount also raised concerns of political influence as well as reports that Paramount is will acquire “anti-woke” Bari Weiss's media venture, The Free Press (where critics have accused her of being a transcriber for billionaires), for between $100 million and $200 million and install Weiss in a senior leadership role at CBS News.

• Normalization of extreme rhetoric: Critics argue that some media outlets have normalized Trump's extreme and at times anti-democratic rhetoric by reporting it as ordinary political discourse. This includes downplaying his verbal attacks on journalists and minimizing the significance of statements such as calling the press the "enemy of the people".

• Focus on process over content: Media outlets have too often focused on the "horse race" of politics rather than the substantive policy implications of Trump's statements and actions. They did this during the Biden-Trump debate, choosing optics and Trump’s show of strength over Biden’s nuanced policy knowledge presented with a weak voice. The media has also used “both sides” to falsely equate conspiracies with established scientific fact, and called it intellectual debate. This blurs the lines between Trump’s factual claims and those that have been found to be false.

Control of media access:

• Press pool restrictions: Trump’s administration took unprecedented control over the selection of journalists who participate in the daily press pool during his second term, polluting the pool with far-right conservative media personalities who have demonstrated loyalty to Trump over facts. This shift en ded the decades-long tradition where the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA), an independent group of journalists, determined pool access.

  Trump has also restricted access to press briefings for certain outlets he deemed unfavorable. For example, the Associated Press was briefly denied access for refusing to use the term "Gulf of America".

• Targeting public broadcasting: In 2025, the administration cut funding for independent public broadcasting networks like NPR and PBS, falsely and without evidence citing biased reporting.

Trump has filed nonstop multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuits against major media outlets to deter critical reporting.

• The New York Times: In September 2025, Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, four of its reporters, and publisher Penguin Random House, claiming defamation over articles and a book published during his 2024 campaign.

• The Wall Street Journal: Trump filed a $10 billion defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal in July 2025 over an article linking him to an old letter involving convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

• CBS and ABC: In 2025, Trump secured multi-million dollar settlements from Paramount Global (CBS's parent company) and Disney (ABC's parent company) for coverage he deemed unfair. In one case, he sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris.

It’s not just a little embarrassing that we don’t have a TV outlet willing to fact-check Trump for two hours here. It would make quite the show, and it would serve the nation. Win-win. But no one is biting.

There are outlets fact-checking him, including PBS, NPR, the AP, CNN and more. But more and more bets are hedged with traditional media softening language as critics are intimidated.

Media organizations typically publish detailed, article-based fact-checks and run shorter, on-air fact-checking segments that address false claims made during a longer speech or interview, like in October 2024, CNN published a fact-check of 32 false claims Donald Trump made during a nearly three-hour-long interview with podcast host Joe Rogan and in March 2025, NBC News provided a detailed, claim-by-claim analysis of Trump’s claims during a joint session of Congress on topics ranging from the economy to immigration.

But no U.S. TV outlet has done a marathon fact-checking of Donald Trump in this fashion. The president who made 30573 false or misleading claims as president has certainly given U.S media cause to think outside of the box, because while a politician lying is not surprising, the breadth and shamelessness with which Trump lies is newsworthy in and of itself.

U.S. media has, with some exceptions, failed the country. It has caved to authoritarianism and even gotten into bed with authoritarianism. It’s shameful that the UK media will do what ours will not, even though it’s undoubtably easier to take on another country’s dictator.

UK activists also unfurled a banner the size of a tennis court with the infamous Trump Epstein photo on it… right outside Windsor Castle, where Trump will be staying.

It should embarrass those who champion what’s happening in this country right now that the much-vaunted freedoms over which we fought the Revolutionary War are now tattered and trampled upon, and here comes Britain to do our job.

What do you think about the difference in the way that the US and UK media are fact-checking Trump? Share your thoughts in the comments below.