The BBC apologized this Thursday (13) to the President of the United States, Donald Trump, for a misleading edition of his speech on January 6, 2021, but stated that there was no defamation, rejecting the arguments of his threat of a US$1 billion lawsuit.
The BBC reported that President Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying he and the broadcaster regretted editing the speech given by Trump before some of his supporters stormed the US Capitol, as Congress prepared to certify the results of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
The BBC said there were no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which included excerpts from the speech given almost an hour apart.
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“We recognize that our editing unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violence,” the BBC wrote in a retraction.
Trump’s lawyer sent a letter to the BBC demanding an apology and threatening a $1 billion lawsuit over the damage caused by the documentary. He had set a deadline of Friday the 14th for the BBC to respond.
The dispute was triggered by an edition of the BBC’s main news program, “Panorama”, entitled “Trump: A Second Chance?”, shown days before the 2024 American presidential election.
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The third-party production company that made the film stitched together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered nearly an hour apart, into what appeared to be a single quote in which Trump urged his supporters to march with him and “fight with all their might.”
Among the parts cut was a section in which Trump said he wanted his supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
The director-general, Tim Davie, and the head of journalism, Deborah Turness, resigned on Sunday, 9th, claiming that the scandal was damaging the BBC and that “as CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the ultimate responsibility lies with me”.
The letter from Trump’s lawyer demanded an apology to the president and a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary, as well as other “false, defamatory, derogatory, misleading or inflammatory statements” about Trump.
The letter also stated that the president should be “properly” compensated for the “impactful financial and reputational damages”.
Legal experts said Trump would face difficulties in bringing the case to court, but could use the error as a way to push for compensation.
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The deadlines for filing the case in the English courts, where damages for defamation rarely exceed £100,000 (around R$699,000), expired more than a year ago. As the documentary was not shown in the USA, it would be difficult to demonstrate that Americans had a worse opinion of him because of a program they were unable to watch.
But the apology and retraction come as the BBC says it is investigating a Daily Telegraph report that a 2022 edition of its Newsnight program had done the same, editing out parts of the same Trump speech.
If the case went to trial, however, legal experts stated that the BBC could demonstrate that Trump suffered no losses, as he ended up being elected president in 2024.
