Maeve Bidonde, Staff Writer
President Trump has recently said that he intends to sue BBC for up to 5 billion dollars after they published a misleading edited version of one of his speeches. BBC News apologized to Trump, but they said that they would not pay compensation as they had not defamed him. In the aftermath of the incident, the broadcaster’s director-general and head of news resigned
According to NBC News the incident happened on the BBC show “Panorama.” On the show, they referred to two parts of Trump’s January 6th, 2021, speech. The first part they mentioned was when he called for supporters to walk to the Capitol, and almost an hour later, Trump said, “We fight, we fight like hell.” When they mentioned these parts of the speech that were said with an hour between them, the broadcasters made it appear like they were spoken after one another and like a direct call for violence.
Trump’s lawyers ended up giving the BBC a deadline of Friday to do the following: Issue a retraction, an apology, and agree to pay Trump compensation. The corporation refused to pay him, but they published a correction saying that they realized the edit “gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”
The chair of BBC, Samir Shah, sent a personal letter to the White House outlining that he and BBC were sorry for the edit a spokesperson revealed and added that although BBC “sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree that there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
The director-general of BBC from 2013-2020 said that BBC should never agree to pay Trump because “You’re talking about public money, it would not be appropriate.” Trump has previously won similar lucrative settlements in the U.S, including one with Paramount in July over “60 Minutes” airing an edited clip of an interview with Former Vice-President Kamala Harris that Trump feels unduly affected the 2024 election he won.
According to The Guardian, Trump, from the steps of Air Force One, told reporters that “We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and 5 billion, probably sometime next week. We have to do it.” The speech involved in the suit was given before Trump Supporters stormed the Capitol building and which led to widespread social media suspensions.
Trump settled with YouTube for $24.5 million, along with Twitter/X and Facebook. The Guardian reports that, according to Court Documents, the money from YouTube is set to be put towards Trump’s new White House ballroom, and the Facebook money is set to be used for his presidential library.
BBC sent a letter to Trump’s legal team detailing that, in their eyes, he has no basis to sue as the program had only been shown in the UK and that he was not damaged by it since he was reelected not long after it aired. Since then, it has been found that an edit was made in 2022 in the BBC’s Newsnight Program similar to the one in the lawsuit.
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