The BBC apologised to President Donald Trump on Thursday for a misleadingly edited documentary about the attacks on the US Capitol, but it refused to pay him any compensation.
It was not clear whether this would forestall a $1-billion lawsuit that Trump’s lawyer threatened to file in a Florida court. The lawyer, Alejandro Brito, demanded an apology, a retraction of the film and damages that “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused”.
The BBC said it would not rebroadcast the documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?, which originally aired in Britain in October 2024, on any of its platforms. But it added, “We strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
The decision to apologise to Trump but not pay compensation reflected both the relative weakness of the BBC’s editorial position on the film and its unique status as a partly publicly funded broadcaster.
The chair of the BBC’s board, Samir Shah, had already apologised for the splicing of two parts of a speech Trump gave in front of the White House on January 6, 2021, hours before a crowd rampaged on Capitol Hill. Shah acknowledged that the editing “did give the impression of a direct call for violent action”.
But there has been rising public opposition in Britain to the idea that the BBC would use funds from licence fees paid by viewers to settle litigation by Trump, who has sued television networks and newspapers in the US.
The leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Ed Davey said in Parliament that the President was “trying to destroy our BBC”. He called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to demand that Trump withdraw the threat of a suit. Starmer, who has worked to cultivate warm ties with Trump, stopped short of that, though he said he would stand up for a “strong, independent BBC”.
Media lawyers in Britain and the US said the President would face high hurdles in winning a trial against the BBC. A court in Florida could rule that it is not the proper jurisdiction for the case, since it is not clear the film ever aired in the US. In Britain, the case could be thrown out on the grounds that he had failed to file it within the statute of limitations: 12 months from the original airing.
On Thursday, Trump said he was “obligated” to sue the BBC for the film, which he claimed had “defrauded the public”. His lawyers gave the BBC a deadline of this Friday to respond to their letter.
“They actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical,” Trump said on the Fox News programme The Ingraham Angle. “And they actually changed it. What they did was rather incredible.”
Shah wrote to Trump personally to convey an apology for the editing, the BBC said. The lapse in the film’s editing had been highlighted in an internal report filed by an independent watchdog, Michael Prescott, which became public when The Daily Telegraph reported on it last week.
On Thursday, The Telegraph reported on what it said had been a second, slightly different, case of misleading editing of the same speech by Trump on the BBC’s marquee program, Newsnight. The BBC said it was investigating the report.
The furore over the film led to the resignations of two top BBC executives, Tim Davie, the director general, and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, and plunged the broadcaster into one of its gravest crises in decades.
New York Times News Service