{"id":7445,"date":"2025-11-13T22:42:51","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T22:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2025\/11\/13\/bbc-apologizes-to-trump-over-its-misleading-edit-but-says-theres-no-basis-for-a-defamation-claim-kgns\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T22:42:51","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T22:42:51","slug":"bbc-apologizes-to-trump-over-its-misleading-edit-but-says-theres-no-basis-for-a-defamation-claim-kgns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2025\/11\/13\/bbc-apologizes-to-trump-over-its-misleading-edit-but-says-theres-no-basis-for-a-defamation-claim-kgns\/","title":{"rendered":"BBC apologizes to Trump over its misleading edit, but says there\u2019s no basis for a defamation claim – KGNS"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

LONDON (AP) \u2014 The BBC apologized Thursday to U.S. President Donald Trump over a misleading edit of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021 but said it had not defamed him, rejecting the basis for his $1 billion lawsuit threat.<\/p>\n

The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of the speech Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was poised to certify the results of President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s victory in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

The BBC said there are no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that came almost an hour apart.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d the BBC wrote in a retraction.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatened to file a $1 billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. It had set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.<\/p>\n

The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC\u2019s flagship current affairs series \u201cPanorama,\u201d titled \u201cTrump: A Second Chance?\u201d broadcast days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.<\/p>\n

The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and \u201cfight like hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.<\/p>\n

Director-General Tim Davie, along with news chief Deborah Turness, quit Sunday, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and \u201cas the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter from Trump\u2019s lawyer demanded an apology to the president and a \u201cfull and fair\u201d retraction of the documentary along with other \u201cfalse, defamatory, disparaging, misleading or inflammatory statements\u201d about Trump.<\/p>\n

It also said the president should be \u201cappropriately\u201d compensated for \u201coverwhelming financial and reputational harm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legal experts have said that Trump would face challenges taking the case to court, but could use the mistake to try leverage a payout.<\/p>\n

Deadlines to bring the case in English courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed 100,000 pounds ($132,000) expired more than a year ago. Because the documentary was not shown in the U.S., it would be hard to show that Americans thought less of him because of a program they could not watch.<\/p>\n

But the apology and retraction came as BBC said it was looking into a report in the Daily Telegraph that its Newsnight program in 2022 had similarly spliced together parts of the same speech by Trump.<\/p>\n

If the case went to trial, however, legal experts said the BBC could show that Trump wasn\u2019t harmed because he was ultimately elected president in 2024.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LONDON (AP) \u2014 The BBC apologized Thursday to U.S. President Donald Trump over a misleading edit of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021 but said it had not defamed him, rejecting the basis for his $1 billion lawsuit threat. The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}