The BBC has issued an apology to US President Donald Trump for editing a documentary in a way that made it seem as though he had endorsed violence.
However, the broadcaster has refused his request for compensation.
The apology appeared in the BBC’s “Corrections and Clarifications” section on Thursday evening, stating that the programme had undergone review following criticism of the edited segment of Trump’s speech.
In the BBC Panorama documentary “Trump: A Second Chance?”, the president was shown saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
A leaked internal memo revealed that these remarks were taken from portions of Trump’s original January 2021 Washington DC speech that were more than 50 minutes apart. In the full speech, Trump had also said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
The memo was referenced in a Telegraph article by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee.
The fallout prompted the resignations of Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News.
In a letter sent Sunday, Trump’s lawyers demanded that the BBC retract the documentary—broadcast last year—by November 14 or face a lawsuit seeking “no less” than $1 billion.
They argued that the edited clip caused Trump “overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” and threatened legal action unless the corporation apologised and provided compensation.
According to a BBC spokesperson, lawyers for the broadcaster responded by saying: “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, which featured in the programme.”
They added, “The BBC has no plans to rebroadcast the documentary Trump: A Second Chance? on any BBC platforms.
“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 BBC’s board has also faced criticism for acting too slowly in response to the editing error, amid growing concerns over the organisation’s “anti-Israel bias” in Arabic-language coverage of the Gaza war and controversies surrounding its reporting on trans issues.
Turness acknowledged that errors had occurred but maintained that “allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”