BBC apologizes to Trump over edit of speech, but says there’s no basis for a defamation claim
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- The BBC apologized to President Trump for an edit of his Jan. 6 speech but rejected his $1 billion lawsuit threat.
- The documentary spliced quotes from his speech delivered an hour apart, making them appear as one continuous call to “fight like hell.”
- BBC’s Director-General and news chief resigned Sunday as the corporation acknowledged this wasn’t the first misleading edit of Trump’s speech.
LONDON — The BBC apologized Thursday to President Trump over what it called a misleading edit of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, but said it had not defamed him, rejecting the basis for his $1-billion lawsuit threat.
The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of the speech Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was poised to certify the results of President-elect Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
The BBC said there are no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that came almost an hour apart.
“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the BBC wrote in a retraction.
Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatened to file a $1-billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. The letter set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.
The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series “Panorama,” titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” broadcast days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”
Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
Director-General Tim Davie, along with news chief Deborah Turness, quit Sunday, with Turness saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and “as the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”
The apology and retraction came as BBC acknowledged that its “Newsnight” program in 2022 had also misleadingly spliced together parts of Trump’s speech.
Trump was impeached and indicted on felony charges for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss.
He was acquitted in the impeachment trial in the Senate, though seven Republican senators voted to convict and then-Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who did not, said that Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
The criminal case against Trump was dropped after he won the 2024 election, as U.S. Justice Department policy holds that a sitting president may not be criminally charged.
Melley writes for the Associated Press.
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