The BBC has apologized to US President Donald Trump for misleadingly editing his speech on January 6, 2021. But he said on Thursday that he had not defamed him and rejected the reason for his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit.
The BBC reported that chairman Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying he and the corporation regretted editing a speech Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed the US Capitol as Congress prepared to confirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which Trump falsely claimed was stolen from him.
Read also | Trump admin announces Operation ‘Southern Spear’ against ‘narco-terrorists’
The publicly funded broadcaster said there were no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which stitched together parts of his speech that were separated by nearly an hour.
“We accept that our editing inadvertently created the impression that we were showing one continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different parts of the speech, and that it gave the false impression that President Trump had directly called for violent action,” the BBC wrote in the appeal.
A $1 billion lawsuit
Trump’s lawyer sent a letter to the BBC demanding an apology and threatening to file a $1 billion lawsuit for damages caused by the documentary. The BBC set a Friday deadline for a response.
While the BBC’s statement did not respond to Trump’s demand that he be compensated for “staggering financial and reputational damage,” the headline on its news story about the apology said it was refusing to pay compensation.
The controversy was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series Panorama titled Trump: A Second Chance? broadcast days before the 2024 US presidential election.
Read also | Trump plans to attend Davos next year in Boost to Switzerland
The third-party production company that made the film combined three quotes from two parts of the 2021 speech into what appeared to be a single quote in which Trump exhorts his supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”
Among the cut parts was a part where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
Director-general Tim Davie, along with head of news Deborah Turnes, resigned on Sunday, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and “as director-general of BBC News and Current Affairs I am stepping in”.
The letter from Trump’s lawyer demanded an apology from the president and a “full and fair” retraction of the document, along with other “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading or inflammatory statements” about Trump.
Read also | Trump plans to attend Davos next year in Boost to Switzerland
Legal experts said Trump would face calls to take the case to a UK or US court. They said the BBC could show that Trump was not damaged because he was eventually elected president in 2024.
Deadlines for bringing the case to English courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed 100,000 pounds ($132,000), expired more than a year ago. Since the documentary was not shown in the US, it would be hard to show that Americans thought less of it because of a program they could not watch.
While many legal experts have dismissed the president’s claims against the media as lacking merit, he has won several lucrative settlements against US media companies and could try to use the BBC’s mistake to pay out, potentially to a charity of his choice.
Read also | On H-1B visas, Trump admin assures US ‘will continue to use visa programs’
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 the interview was edited to improve how Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, sounded.
The settlement comes as the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation that threatened to complicate Paramount’s need for administration approval to merge with Skydance Media.
Read also | Donald Trump ended a historic 43-day government shutdown by signing the funding bill
Last year, ABC News said it would pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate on-air claim that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll. A jury found him liable for sexually abusing her.
The apology and retraction came as the BBC said it was investigating a report in the Daily Telegraph that its Newsnight program had similarly spliced together parts of the same Trump speech in 2022.
(With input from agencies)
