BBC apologizes to Trump for misleading edit, but rejects basis for defamation claim

LONDON (AFP) – The BBC apologized Thursday to US President Donald Trump for a misleading edit of his speech on January 6, 2021, but said it did not defame him, rejecting the basis for his threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit.

The BBC said that President Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House in which he said that he and the institution were sorry for modifying the speech that Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed the US Capitol building while Congress was preparing to certify the victory of President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 elections, which Trump falsely claimed were stolen from him.

He watches: BBC under scrutiny for editing Trump’s January 6 speech

The publicly funded broadcaster said there were no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which combined parts of his speech about an hour apart.

“We accept that our edit inadvertently created the impression that we were showing one continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the false impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the BBC wrote in its retraction.

Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatening to file a billion-dollar lawsuit for the damage caused to him by the documentary. It set a deadline of Friday for the BBC to respond.

While the BBC’s statement does not respond to Trump’s demand for compensation for the “enormous financial and reputational damage”, the headline of its news story about the apology stated that she had refused to pay compensation.

The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship Panorama series, Trump: A Second Chance? It aired days before the 2024 US presidential election.

The third-party production company that produced the film combined three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech into what appears to be a single quote in which Trump urged his supporters to go along with him and “fight like hell.”

Among the parts that were cut was a section in which Trump said he wanted his supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

Director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Torness resigned on Sunday, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC, and “as chief executive of BBC news and current affairs, the responsibility lies with me.”

Trump’s lawyers’ letter demanded an apology to the president and a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary along with other “false, defamatory, offensive, misleading, or inflammatory” statements about Trump.

Legal experts said Trump would face challenges in taking the case to court in the United Kingdom or the United States. They said the BBC could show that Trump was not harmed because he was eventually elected president in 2024.

The deadlines for bringing the case before the English courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed 100,000 pounds ($132,000), expired more than a year ago. Because the documentary was not shown in the United States, it would be difficult to show that Americans didn’t think much of it because of a program they couldn’t watch.

While many legal experts have dismissed the president’s claims against the media as baseless, he has won some lucrative settlements against US media companies and could try to leverage the BBC’s wrongdoing to seek damages, perhaps for a charity of his choice.

In July, Paramount, which owns CBS, agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump claimed that the interview was edited to improve the appearance of Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024.

The settlement came as the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation that threatens to complicate Paramount’s need to gain administration approval for its merger with Skydance Media.

Last year, ABC News said it would pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury found him responsible for sexually assaulting her

The apology and retraction came as the BBC said it was looking into a report in the Daily Telegraph that its Newsnight program in 2022 similarly incorporated parts of the same Trump speech.