Trump Threatens BBC With Legal Action After Doctored Speech Suggested He Encouraged Capitol Riot
U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened the BBC with legal action amid widespread uproar over an edited speech of his in a Panorama documentary.
On Sunday night, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and the corporation’s director-general Tim Davie resigned after the BBC was found to have edited the Jan. 6, 2021 address where Trump, speaking before the attack on the Capitol in Washington D.C., was made to appear as though he was “calling for violent action,” said BBC Chair Samir Shah on Monday, when in fact he asked supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
In the speech, Trump said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” However, in the Panorama edit, he was shown saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” The two clips stitched together were, in actuality, more than 50 minutes apart.
BBC News reported Monday afternoon that it has now received a letter from the Republican president threatening legal action — as he has done with a myriad of news outlets in the U.S., including The New York Times and Wall Street Journal — and that they will respond in due course.
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Trump said on Truth Social that those involved in the BBC controversy were “corrupt” journalists who “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.” Among other claims, he said that the news was “a terrible thing for democracy.”
Outside the BBC’s London headquarters Monday, Turness told the press: “Our journalists aren’t corrupt and I will stand by their journalism,” adding that she stepped down from her role “because the buck stops with me. But I’d like to make one thing very clear, BBC News is not institutionally biased. That’s why it’s the world’s most trusted news provider.”
Shah followed up with an apology before the news of Trump’s pending lawsuit broke, admitting that the edited speech was an “error of judgment.” He said in a letter to the British government: “We accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action. The BBC would like to apologize for that error of judgement,” before defending the news org’s integrity and importance.
As the issue was handled as part of a wider review of the BBC’s U.S. election coverage and not as a specific program complaint, “the point wasn’t pursued further at the time,” added Shah. “With hindsight, it would have been better to take more formal action,” he concluded.
The news of the edited speech was first reported by The Telegraph, who published a leaked memo from former BBC Editorial Guidelines and Standards committee adviser Michael Prescott.
