Donald Trump has said he feels he has “an obligation” to sue the BBC over its editing of one of his speeches, as a deadline looms for the corporation to respond to his billion-dollar legal threat.
The US president accused the broadcaster of having “defrauded the public” with an edition of Panorama last year that spliced together two parts of a speech he made on 6 January 2021 and has given it until Friday to respond.
It is seen as one of the main factors in the shock resignation on Sunday of Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News.
The BBC has already apologised for the edit, concluding that it “gave the impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. It now faces a major dilemma over how to react to the legal threat, made in a Florida court.
Trump doubled down on his legal challenge to the BBC. “I think I have an obligation to do it, you can’t allow people to do that,” he said in an interview on Fox News. “I guess I have to. They defrauded the public and they’ve admitted it. This is within one of our great allies, supposedly our great ally.
“That’s a pretty sad event. They actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical. They showed me the results of how they butchered it up. It was very dishonest and the head man quit and a lot of the other people quit.”
The documentary, broadcast a week before the US election, spliced together clips of a Trump speech made on 6 January 2021. The spliced clip suggested that Trump told the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
The words were taken from sections of his speech almost an hour apart.
Legal experts have questioned the Trump team’s chances of victory in any court case, given Florida’s liberal libel laws and the fact the Panorama episode was not available in the state.
However, the BBC has to weigh up whether it wishes to fight such a public battle, while other US-based broadcasters sued by Trump have settled out of court. Given it is funded by the licence fee, any settlement by the BBC would be politically toxic.
The edit was one of the criticisms of the corporation raised in a memo by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee (EGSC). He left the role in the summer.
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There is anger within the BBC over the Trump programme after it emerged senior editors were challenged about the editing of the show months ago but took no action to correct it.
However, there is also concern over the political nature of the Prescott memo, which outlines a series of claims of liberal bias relating to issues stretching over several years. The BBC has said some of the issues are historical, while action has already been taken in relation to others.
Prescott has said there was no political motivation to his memo.
