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 idea for his $1-billion lawsuit threat.
The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a private letter to the White House saying that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of the speech Trump gave before a few of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was poised to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory within the 2020 election that Trump falsely alleged was stolen from him.
The publicly funded broadcaster said there are not any plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that got here almost an hour apart.
“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, slightly than excerpts from different points within the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent motion,” the BBC wrote in a retraction.
Trump’s 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 reply.
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While the BBC statement doesn’t reply to Trump’s demand that he be compensated for “overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” the headline on its news story concerning the apology said it refused to pay compensation.
The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series Panorama, titled Trump: A Second Probability? broadcast days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech into what gave the impression to be one quote during which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”
Among the many parts cut out was a piece where Trump said he wanted supporters to exhibit peacefully.
Director-General Tim Davie, together with news chief Deborah Turness, quit Sunday, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and “because the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”
The letter from Trump’s lawyer demanded an apology to the president and a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary together with other “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading or inflammatory statements” about Trump.
Legal experts have said that Trump would face challenges taking the case to court within the U.K. or the U.S. They said that the BBC could show that Trump wasn’t harmed because he was ultimately elected president in 2024.
Deadlines to bring the case in English courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed 100,000 kilos ($132,000) expired greater than a yr ago. Since the documentary was not shown within the U.S., it could be hard to point out that Americans thought less of him due to a program they may not watch.
While many legal experts have dismissed the president’s claims against the media as having little merit, he has won some lucrative settlements against U.S. media corporations and he could attempt to leverage the BBC mistake for a payout, potentially to a charity of his alternative.
In July, Paramount, which owns CBS, agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump alleged that the interview was edited to reinforce how Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in 2024, sounded.
That settlement got here because the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation that threatened to complicate Paramount’s need for administration approval to merge with Skydance Media.
Last yr, ABC News said it could pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly answerable for raping author E. Jean Carroll. A jury found that he was answerable for sexually abusing her.
The apology and retraction got here as BBC said it was looking right into a report within the Each day Telegraph that its Newsnight program in 2022 had similarly spliced together parts of the identical speech by Trump.
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