President Donald Trump likes his news apologetic, but more than that, he likes news organizations to show conciliation through cash payments. Earlier this year, he shook down CBS and ABC for roughly $15 million over various defamation allegations. However, while ABC settled with the billionaire co-founder of Truth Social for $15 million and apologized, CBS paid him $16 million and did not. The BBC did the opposite, offering Trump an apology but refusing to pay. In a report published today, the BBC stated that it has apologized for splicing parts of Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech together but “rejected his demands for compensation.” As they have done to other news organizations, Trump’s lawyers threated to sue the BBC for $1 billion over the edit.
“BBC chair Samir Shah has 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,” a BBC spokesperson said. “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.”
Over the weekend, The Daily Telegraph published a note from a whistleblower stating that a 2024 episode of the docuseries Panorama spliced together parts of Trump’s January 6 speech that were 50 minutes apart, giving, as the BBC puts it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump made a call for violent action.” The news caused an upheaval at the BBC, leading to the resignations of two executives: Tim Davie, the network’s director general, and Deborah Turness, its head of news. Unfortunately for the BBC, this wasn’t the first time they’ve done this. Today, The Daily Telegraph found another instance of the BBC making a similar edit to the same speech nearly two years earlier for a 2022 episode of Newsnight.
President Trump has a long history of threatening to sue media organizations. Over the summer, he threatened The Wall Street Journal with a $10 billion lawsuit over its publishing a news story alleging that Trump had written the infamous “enigmas never age” letter in Jeffrey Epstein’s extremely disgusting 2003 birthday book.
