London: US President Donald Trump has declared that he intends to proceed with legal action against the BBC despite the British public service broadcaster apologising to him for the way his speech was edited for one of its news documentaries aired last year.
“We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and 5 billion dollars, probably sometime next week,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One overnight Saturday.
“We have to do it; they’ve even admitted that they cheated. Not that they couldn’t have done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth,” he said.
The row follows an intense period for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), resulting in the resignation of top officials and an apology for an “error of judgment” from its Indian-origin chair, Samir Shah.
Thursday, the BBC said the edit of Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech had unintentionally given “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action” and said it would not be broadcast again. While it has apologised to the American President, the BBC has ruled out paying any financial compensation.
Trump had threatened to sue the broadcaster for USD 1 billion in damages unless the corporation issued a retraction, apology and paid him compensation. However, he has now said he intends to proceed with the legal action despite the apology.
In an interview with the UK’s GB News, Trump said that while he was not looking to get into lawsuits, he felt he had an “obligation to do it”.
“This was so egregious. If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people,” he said.
The ‘Panorama’ documentary in contention was aired in October 2024 and referenced Trump’s 2021 address in Washington, DC, when he told his supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
Over 50 minutes later in the speech, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
However, the programme showed him saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
Controversy around how Trump’s speech was edited has led to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness.
“We 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,” a BBC statement stated.
A BBC spokesperson said lawyers for the broadcaster wrote back to Trump’s legal team and that BBC chair Samir Shah separately sent a personal letter to the White House “making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the president’s speech on 6 January 2021, which featured in the programme”.
“While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,” the spokesperson said.
PTI
