"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
The quote – from George Orwell's Animal Farm – is etched on the wall of the BBC’s headquarters in central London, behind a statue of Orwell who once worked for the broadcaster.
People in the BBC have heard a lot of things they did not want to hear over the course of recent weeks.
The crisis the organisation faces is one of the most serious in decades.
Resignations, recriminations and regrets have abounded in a week capped off by a renewed threat by the US President to sue the BBC for anywhere between $1bn-$5bn.
The BBC is, quite simply, a broadcasting behemoth. They are three letters that represent a media dominance of which other broadcasters can only dream.
But with supremacy comes intense scrutiny.
The resignations last weekend of the BBC Director General Tim Davie and the BBC’s Head of News Deborah Turness did little to stem the controversy around a Panorama programme involving US President Donald Trump.
The hour–long documentary at the centre of this most recent row was called "Trump: A Second Chance?" and was broadcast over a year ago, a week before the US election.
The issues surrounding the broadcast were highlighted in a leaked internal report published by the Daily Telegraph in the UK, compiled for the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser.
In it, Mr Prescott accused the Panorama programme of taking a "distinctly anti-Trump stance".
The programme edited together two excerpts from a speech Mr Trump gave, creating the impression that he was inciting the January 2021 Capitol Hill riot, he said.
Watch: Donald Trump says he will sue BBC for as much as $5bn over video edit
Mr Trump was shown telling his supporters that "we're going to walk down to the Capitol" and that they would "fight like hell", a comment he made in a different part of his speech.
An apology for the edit followed this week, after the leaked report highlighted the issue.
But the BBC did not acquiesce to Mr Trump’s suggestion that he be paid compensation for the reputational damage done to him by the broadcast.
But that was too little, too late for the US President who has once again vowed to begin legal action against the BBC on the issue, raising the amount he will seek in compensation fivefold from his original threat.
He also mentioned discussing the issue with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in what will no doubt be an awkward conversation for Mr Starmer.
The issues are manifold - a serious editorial error that the BBC admits now should not have happened, an argument and legal threats from the most powerful leader in the West and a BBC which has weathered several major crises in recent times.
Under the leadership of Tim Davie, the BBC’s 17th Director General, those scandals ranged from how Princess Diana was convinced to do a high-profile Panorama interview in 1995, to the arrest and subsequent conviction of news anchor Huw Edwards for possession of indecent images of children as well as the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza.
Mr Davie had weathered so many headlines during his time at the top of the broadcaster that his ability to survive in his post had earned him the nickname "Teflon Tim".
But the serious editorial error in the Panorama programme on Donald Trump – and the significant delay in issuing the apology for it - compounded the sense of an organisation failing to tackle a serious issue.
Reports of disagreements at board level over how to deal with the issue further fed a sense of crisis, with some talking of a politically motivated "coup" within the organisation, a suggestion described as "fanciful" by the Chair of the BBC board.
After such a tumultuous time, it might be expected that the apologies and resignations would have done something to steady the ship, but in fact the crisis continues.
The US President has doubled down on his legal threats and the BBC has made it clear it does not see compensation for Mr Trump, which would be paid from public funds, as a reasonable option.
While there are widely varying views about the chance of success for any legal action Mr Trump might take, the BBC will remain mired in this disagreement if it reaches the courts, perhaps remembering another George Orwell quote, this time from Homage to Catalonia - "there are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all".
