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 lawsuit threat.
The BBC said 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 President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election that Trump falsely alleged was stolen from him.
The publicly funded broadcaster 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.
Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatened to file a $1-billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. It had set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.
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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.
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 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 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 U.K. or the U.S. 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 pounds ($132,000) expired more than a year ago. Because the documentary was not shown in the U.S., it would be hard to show that Americans thought less of him because of a program they could not watch.
While many legal experts have dismissed the president’s claims against the media as having little merit, he has won some lucrative settlements against U.S. media companies and he could try to leverage the BBC mistake for a payout, potentially to a charity of his choice.
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 alleged that the interview was edited to enhance how Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in 2024, sounded.
That settlement came 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.
Last year, ABC News said it would pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. A jury found that he was liable for sexually abusing her.
The apology and retraction came as BBC said it was looking into a report in the Daily Telegraph that its Newsnight program in 2022 had similarly spliced together parts of the same speech by Trump.
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