The BBC has apologized to President Donald Trump following his threats to sue for defamation over a documentary that included edited parts of his speech that made it seem like he explicitly encouraged the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Trump lambasted the British broadcaster in a Fox News interview on Tuesday for editing the speech in a “Panorama” documentary and has threatened to sue for $1 billion unless it issues a retraction and an apology and compensates him. The network scrambled to respond, and two of the network’s high-profile leaders, director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness, resigned in the wake of the controversy.
“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,” a correction published on Thursday read. “The BBC would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgement.”
The BBC’s chair, Samir Shah, has also personally apologized to Trump in a letter. The BBC did not immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment on the details of that letter.
The network also said the program would not be broadcast again in its original form on any BBC platforms, but it refuses to pay damages. In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Tuesday, Trump called the speech “beautiful” and “calming,” and said that “they made it sound radical.” The BBC’s legal team has argued that there is no basis for a defamation claim as the clip was not edited out of malice and that it was never intended to be viewed out of context, saying, “Rather, it was 12 seconds within an hour-long programme, which also contained lots of voices in support of Trump.” It also refuted Trump’s claim that the video harmed him by noting that he was reelected.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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