The British broadcasting corporation BBC apologised to US President Donald Trump for the episode of the Panorama programme in which fragments of his speech of 6 January 2021 were edited, but rejected his claims for compensation. This is reported on the website of the BBC.
The corporation said the montage created a “false impression as if President Trump had directly called for violent action” and said it would no longer show the 2024 programme.
In a section” of corrections and clarifications” published on Thursday night, the BBC said the Panorama programme had been revised after criticism of the editing of Trump’s speech.
“We recognise that our editing inadvertently gave the impression that we were showing one continuous section of the Speech rather than excerpts from different moments of the speech, and that this gave the false impression that President Trump had explicitly called for violent action,” it said.
BBC lawyers wrote a letter to President Trump’s legal team in response to the letter received on Sunday, a BBC spokesperson said.
“BBC chairman Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House informing President Trump that he and the corporation apologise for the editing of the president’s 6 January 2021 speech that was featured in the programme,” he said.
The representative of the broadcaster noted that “while the BBC sincerely regrets the way the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree that there are grounds for a libel claim”.
Earlier it became known that Trump’s lawyers are threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion for damages if the corporation does not retract, apologise and pay him compensation.
On 9 November, BBC director general Tim Davie and news chief executive Deborah Turness resigned.
It came after The Telegraph newspaper published details of a leaked internal BBC memo that said the programme had edited two parts of Trump’s speech to make it appear as if he had explicitly called for riots at the Capitol in January 2021.
US President Donald Trump welcomed the news of his resignation and thanked The Telegraph for exposing media corruption, which he called “a terrible thing for democracy”.