Three days after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened it with a $1 billion defamation lawsuit over misleading editing of a speech he gave on Jan. 6, Britain’s BBC issued a retraction but refused to pay compensation. Photo by Andy Rain/EPA
Nov. 14 (UPI) — The BBC issued a retraction and a formal apology to U.S. President Donald Trump for edits to a speech he gave ahead of the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill that made it appear as if he was inciting his supporters to violence.
The British public service broadcaster apologized Thursday night via the corrections page on its website, with the apology the lead story across all of its news platforms on television, radio and online during the evening and first thing Friday morning.
BBC Chairman Samir Shah also penned a personal written apology to the White House, however, the BBC indicated it would not be paying compensation, as demanded by Trump.
The retraction said an edition of Panorama titled Trump: A Second Chance, broadcast on Oct. 28, 2024, used excerpts lifted from different parts of Trump’s speech in a way that inadvertently made it appear they were contiguous.
The BBC’s version had Trump saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell,” when his actual words were, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
The BBC said it accepted that this “gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”
“The BBC would like to apologize to President Trump for that error of judgment.”
However, the notice made no mention of compensation, one of President Trump’s key demands in his letter threatening the BBC with a $1 billion lawsuit alleging the program had defamed him and giving it until 5 p.m. EST on Friday to respond.
A BBC spokesman said the corporation strongly disagreed “there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
There was no immediate response from either the White House or Trump’s legal counsel.
The Panorama program was not an isolated incident, according to The Telegraph, which said the BBC’s Newsnight program did something very similar with the same speech in a broadcast in 2022.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said that from the latest revelation it was “now clear that the BBC engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump” and accused it of attempting to try to influence the outcome of the 2024 election.
The debacle has sparked a furious debate about editorial impartiality at the BBC, which is funded by a $229 annual license that every household with a TV must pay, prompting calls for an overhaul of internal processes and procedures.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy acknowledged the BBC’s editorial rules were “in some cases not robust enough and in other cases not consistently applied,” and appeared to suggest the replacement for director-general Tim Davie, who quit Sunday, must be from a journalism background.
Davie spent the first half of his career as a senior marketing executive at PepsiCo before joining the BBC’s marketing division.
The opposition Conservative’s Shadow Culture Secretary, Nigel Huddleston, said he was waiting to see if Trump accepted the BBC’s response to be the “fulsome apology” he was entitled to receive.
“I do not want the British license fee payer or the rest of the BBC to pay the price for poor editorial decisions made by BBC journalists, he said in a post on X.
“However, we would all be in a better position if the BBC had never made these errors in the first place. The BBC needs a fundamental review of processes and procedures to ensure that such failures in impartiality never happen again.”
