BBC Apologizes To Donald Trump Over Editing Of January 6th Speech, But Refuses To Pay Compensation In Response To Legal Threat

BBC Apologizes To Donald Trump Over Editing Of January 6th Speech, But Refuses To Pay Compensation In Response To Legal Threat

In its letter to Trump's legal team, the BBC sets out five main arguments for why it does not think it has a case to answer

First it says the BBC did not have the rights to, and did not, distribute the Panorama episode on its US channels.

When the documentary was available on BBC iPlayer, it was restricted to viewers in the UK.

The BBC apologized to President Donald Trump on Thursday over a clip that appeared on a Panorama documentary in which different parts of his speech on January 6, 2021 were edited together.

According to a report on the network, the BBC called it an “error of judgment,” and said that it had no plans to broadcast the documentary on any of its platforms. But the BBC did not offer to pay Trump any damages.

“While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,” a spokesperson for the network said.

Trump had threatened to sue to the network for $1 billion over the edit on the documentary, which was broadcast last year. In addition to an apology and a retraction, he had sought compensation.

In the fallout from the focus on the edited speech, BBC Director General Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, who led the news division, stepped down.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The BBC’s legal team responded to the legal threat, and the BBC’s chair, Samir Shah, sent an apology to the White House “making clear to President Trump that he and the Corporation are sorry for the edit of the President’s speech on 6 January 2021, which featured in the programme,” the spokesperson said.

In the documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?, a clip is shown from his January 6 speech, in which he says, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” In fact, the remark was an edit of different portions of the speech.

Trump’s legal team claimed that the BBC “intentionally sought to completely mislead its viewers by splicing together three separate parts of President Trump’s speech to supporters on January 6, 2021.”

The legal threat was that a lawsuit would be filed in Florida. The documentary, though, did not air on U.S. streamer BBC Select so it was not available in the United States. The legal letter sent to the BBC stated that clips “have been widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums, which have reached tens of millions of people worldwide.”

Trump has had a number of defamation claims and other litigation tossed out in the courts through the years, but as he returned to the White House, he has been successful at securing settlements from major networks and tech platforms. In December, ABC agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit over remarks that George Stephanopoulos made on This Week. CBS agreed to pay the same sum over a lawsuit that Trump filed over an edit to a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The latter litigation was not a defamation claim, but alleged a violation of a Texas consumer law.

The edited clip emerged as a major crisis for the BBC after the leak of an internal memo written by adviser Michael Prescott to BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board. The Daily Telegraph published details of the memo.

written by a former independent external adviser to the corporation's editorial standards committee, was published by the Telegraph newspaper. Among other things, the document also criticised the BBC's reporting of trans issues, and BBC Arabic's coverage of the Israel-Gaza war.