The BBC has apologised for the misleading way that its flagship current affairs programme Panorama edited a speech by President Trump. It says it has no plans to rebroadcast it but does not accept that there is a basis for a defamation claim. The President has threated to sue the corporation for at least a billion dollars in damages.
Lawyers for the BBC have responded to a letter received from a law firm acting on behalf of President Trump, who has nevertheless told reporters: “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion”.
Samir Shah, the chair of the BBC has separately sent a personal letter 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.
During his address, the President told supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
The Panorama episode, produced by an independent company October Films, cut this together with a clip taken from more than 50 minutes later in the speech, so the President appeared to say: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The programme was broadcast in the United Kingdom on 28 October 2024, just days before the 2024 United States presidential election.
In a statement on the BBC web site corrections and clarifications section it says the Panorama programme, Trump: A Second Chance? was reviewed after criticism of how the speech was edited.
“During that sequence, we showed excerpts taken from different parts of the speech,” it states. “However, 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.”
It adds: “The BBC would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgement. This programme was not scheduled to be re-broadcast and will not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms.”
In its response to the lawyers for President Trump, the BBC set out five main arguments that it did not accept it was defamatory.
Firstly, it said the BBC did not have the rights to, and did not, distribute the programme on its channels in the United States and when it was available online it was restricted to viewers in the United Kingdom.
Secondly, it argues that it did not cause harm as the President was subsequently re-elected.
Thirdly, it suggests the edit was not designed to mislead or done with malice.
Fourthly, the edited speech was not meant to be considered in isolation.
Finally, an opinion on a matter of public concern and political speech is heavily protected under defamation laws in the United States.
Even if the apparent defamation is legally defensible, what is indefensible is that it has allowed President Trump to brand the BBC as “fake news” and seriously undermine its claim to impartiality and trust.
It seems that it is not the first time that a BBC current affairs programme has misleadingly edited this speech.
On Newsnight in 2022 there was a similar juxtaposition. On that occasion a former White House chief of staff immediately observed that it had taken a line from later in the speech.
Whether or not this ever comes to court, it seems extraordinary that the BBC managed to turn an egregious error of editing judgement into a crisis that has claimed another resignation of its most senior executive at a critical time for the corporation.