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The BBC apologized Thursday to U.S. President Donald Trump over a misleading edit of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, but said it had not defamed him, rejecting the basis for his $1-billion US lawsuit threat.
The British network said its 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 U.S. president-elect Joe 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.
Apology demanded
Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatened to file a $1 billion US lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. It had set a Friday deadline for the public broadcaster to respond.
This side-by-side comparison shows the BBC-edited and original footage from a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Critics accuse the British broadcaster of editing the speech in a way that makes it appear he encouraged the subsequent U.S. Capitol attack.
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, 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.
