BBC apologises to Trump for edited speech but refuses $1 billion compensation claim
The BBC apologised to US President Donald Trump on Thursday for editing his 6 January 2021 speech in a Panorama documentary, but said it had not defamed him.
The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House, saying he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of Trump's speech that preceded some of his supporters storming the US Capitol as Congress was poised to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
The British public broadcaster rejected Trump's demands for compensation in a $1 billion lawsuit threat sent by the US president's administration earlier this week. It had set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.
“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.
While the BBC statement doesn’t 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.
It added that there are no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that came almost an hour apart.
Documentary aired before 2024 US election
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 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.
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.”
Legal experts have said that Trump would face challenges taking the case to court in the UK or the US. They said that the BBC could show that Trump wasn’t harmed because he was ultimately elected president in 2024.
Deadlines to bring the case in English courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed £100,000, 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 programme they could not watch.