BBC apologizes to Trump over its misleading edit, but says no basis for defamation claim

By AP 14 November 2025, 3:10 am

3 Edit

The BBC has apologized to US President Donald Trump over a misleading edit of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021 but said it had not defamed him, rejecting the basis for his $1 billion lawsuit threat.

The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of the speech Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed 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.

The publicly funded broadcaster said there are no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that came almost an hour apart.

“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the BBC wrote in a retraction.

Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatened to file a $1 billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. It had set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.

While the BBC statement doesn’t respond to Trump’s demand that he be compensated for “overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” the headline on its news story about the apology said it refused to pay compensation.

The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series “Panorama,” titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” broadcast days before the 2024 US presidential election.

The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”

Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.