The BBC on Thursday apologized to US 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 US$1 billion lawsuit threat.
BBC 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 US Capitol as the US Congress was poised to certify then-US president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election that Trump falsely alleged was stolen from him.
There are no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that came almost an hour apart, the BBC said.
Photo: Reuters
“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 US$1 billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. It had set yesterday as the deadline for the BBC to respond.
While the BBC statement does not respond to Trump’s demand that he be compensated for “overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” the headline on its news story about the apology said it refused to pay compensation.
The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s Panorama, broadcast days before last year’s US presidential election.
The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech 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.
BBC director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness quit on Sunday last week, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and “as the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”
The letter from Trump’s lawyer demanded an apology to the president and a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary along with other “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading or inflammatory statements” about Trump.
Legal experts have said that Trump would face challenges taking the case to court in the UK or the US.
The BBC could show that Trump was not harmed, because he was ultimately elected president, they said.
Deadlines to bring the case in English courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed ￡100,000 (US$131,960) expired more than a year ago. Because the documentary was not shown in the US, it would be hard to show that Americans thought less of him because of a program they could not watch.
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