LONDON, Nov 14: The BBC has issued a public apology to US President Donald Trump over a misleading edit of his speech on January 6, 2021, but said it “strongly disagreed there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
Since it was established more than a century ago, Britain’s public broadcaster has been no stranger to controversy. Over the past week, it has been embroiled in a major crisis as its director general stepped down, its head of news quit, questions were raised over the veracity of its journalism and Trump said he is mulling a billion-dollar lawsuit.
What prompted the crisis?
Pressure on the broadcaster has been growing since the right-leaning Daily Telegraph published parts of a dossier compiled by the BBC’s adviser on standards and guidelines on November 3.
As well as criticising the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues and raising concerns of anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s Arabic service, the dossier said that an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series “Panorama” — titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” — broadcast days before the 2024 US presidential election was misleading.
Specifically, it showed how the third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the January 6, 2021 speech into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”
By doing so, it made it look like Trump was giving the green light to his supporters to storm the US Capitol as Congress was poised to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election that Trump falsely alleged was stolen from him.
‘I guess I have to’
The outcry from opponents of the BBC — and there are many both in the UK and abroad — was immediate and vociferous.
The broadcaster was accused of bias against Trump, symptomatic of they say an inherent liberal bias within the organization.
For days, the BBC said very little, saying it did not report to leaked reports. Many thought that was a misjudgement as it allowed the narrative around the edit to be led by its opponents. By November 9, the pressure on the BBC was becoming increasingly acute, prompting its top executive, Tim Davie, and head of news Deborah Turness to resign over what the broadcaster called an “error of judgment.”
It was also revealed that Trump was demanding a retraction, apology and compensation over the sequence. “I guess I have to,” Trump said when asked about whether he would go through with his legal threat. “Because I think they defrauded the public and they’ve admitted it.” (AP)
