The BBC apologizes to Trump but refuses to pay any compensation.

LondonThe BBC has preempted Donald Trump's ultimatum and on Thursday night issued a statement apologizing to the US president for airing an episode of the program Panorama that assembled fragments of his speech January 6, 2021when the storming of the Capitol took place, as if it were a continuous sequence. Even so, the Corporation flatly rejects the demands for financial compensation made by his lawyers and denies that there is any basis for a defamation lawsuit.

Trump had given the network until this Friday at 11:00 p.m. London time to rectify, retract, and satisfy him with the payment of money for alleged damages. If they did not, he would put them on the air. a billion dollar lawsuitThe scandal, initially revealed by The Daily Telegraph Last week, the investigation has expanded in recent hours with the discovery of a second video, allegedly also manipulated and broadcast on the program Newsnight in 2022. All of this has unleashed an unprecedented internal crisis at the BBC, which so far has resulted in the resignation, last Sunday, of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness.

In the statement issued this Thursday evening, the BBC admits that the editing of the speech in Panorama –issued in 2024 under the title Trump: A Second Chance? By juxtaposing phrases spoken more than fifty minutes apart, Trump could give the false impression that he had called for violence. In the episode, the editing played consecutively "Go to the Capitol... I'll be with you" and "We fight. We fight tooth and nail," even though these phrases were unrelated in the original speech. "We accept that the editing unintentionally created the impression that we were showing one continuous clip," the corporation admitted.

It is no less true, however, that in the days leading up to January 6, Trump had called, in more or less subtle ways, for subverting the election results with all sorts of statements, facts for which there is ample evidence. The chairman of the BBC's governing council, Samir Shah, has sent a personal letter to the White House to express his "regret" for the way the video was edited. The BBC has also confirmed that it will not re-air the documentary.

A pattern that goes back a long way?

The apologies arrived practically at the same time as, once again The Daily Telegraph —a right-wing media newspaper, which has targeted the BBC for years— has revealed that Newsnight A BBC2 news program, broadcast daily from Monday to Friday starting at 10:30 p.m., aired an almost identical montage of the same speech in 2022, also splicing together segments separated by almost an hour as if they were consecutive. That video made it appear as if Trump was urging his supporters to "fight like never before" as they marched toward the Capitol with him. According to the British newspaper, a former White House chief of staff had already criticized that montage live on air, but his warnings were ignored by the presenter, Kirsty Wark. All of this would call into question the BBC's version of events, according to which the case of Panorama It was an isolated and accidental error. Furthermore, they are focusing on Jonathan Munro, now head of the news division following Deborah Turness's resignation. Munro was serving as interim director when Newsnight The BBC aired the manipulated version of Trump's speech.

Trump, interviewed by Fox News the day before yesterday, claimed that his speech was "butchered" and that the editing "deceived" viewers. The BBC, despite "sincerely" regretting the way the video was edited, insists that there is no legal basis for a defamation lawsuit. A lawsuit that, for its part, would have little chance of succeeding, and which Trump's lawyers had or have planned to file in the state of Florida.

The debate about journalistic ethics, however, is now open. Because while Trump made all sorts of statements that tended, at best, to create the impression of staging a coup, it is no less true that the BBC's editing was not the most orthodox. A superimposition of the time he said one thing and another would have been enough to clarify the facts.