President Donald Trump filed a massive defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation on Monday over an edit of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that appeared in a BBC “Panorama” documentary.
The lawsuit claims that the BBC’s “deceptive and defamatory distortion, doctoring, manipulation, and splicing damaged President Trump in his occupation, damaged his professional reputation, and portrayed him as engaging in supposed calls for rioting and violence that he never actually made.”
‘The FAKE NEWS “reporters” in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s**t as the ones here in America.’
The complaint notes further that the “aggressively anti-Trump” documentary, which aired shortly before the 2024 presidential election and painted Kamala Harris as an optimal candidate, constituted “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.”
A tale of two speeches
Trump originally said at 12:12 p.m. in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021:
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you — we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Any one you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness.
The president noted nearly an hour later after first raising concerns about voting irregularities and potential fraud in the 2020 election, “Most people would stand there at nine o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong — can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
The “Panorama” documentary spliced and reorganized Trump’s remarks to make it appear as though he said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
In addition to creating a false narrative by coupling two parts of the speech that were divided by over 50 minutes’ worth of content and omitting Trump’s call for supporters to behave “peacefully,” the documentary showed flag-waving men descending on the Capitol after the president spoke — despite the video having been recorded before Trump’s speech.
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Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Telegraph obtained and reported on a whistleblower memo earlier this year revealing that there were concerns at the BBC over the apparently deceptive work.
The whistleblower memo noted that the “mangled” footage made Trump “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” and insinuated, with the help of the footage of men marching on the Capitol, that “Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call to arms.'”
Too little, too late
Last month, the BBC came under fire both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Telegraph, “Trust in the media is at an all-time low because of deceptive editing, misleading reporting, and outright lies. This is yet another example, of many, highlighting why countless Americans turn to alternative media sources to get their news.”
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS ‘reporters’ in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s**t as the ones here in America!!!”
“This is a total disgrace. The BBC has doctored footage of Trump to make it look as though he incited a riot — when he in fact said no such thing,” wrote former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “We have Britain’s national broadcaster using a flagship programme to tell palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally. Is anyone at the BBC going to take responsibility — and resign?”
In the face of mounting pressure, the BBC issued a retraction, and the director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News, both resigned in disgrace.
“Like all public organizations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent, and accountable,” Davie said in statement. “Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made, and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Turness similarly assumed some responsibility for the fiasco, noting the controversy had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC” and adding that “the buck stops with me.”
‘The BBC had no regard for the truth.’
Turness suggested, however, that the broadcast corporation was not biased.
“In public life, leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down,” said Turness. “While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
Samir Shah, the chair of the BBC, subsequently sent a personal letter to the White House apologizing for the edit; however, the network refused to pay compensation, claiming that there was no basis for Trump’s defamation claim.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss encouraged Trump to take legal action against the BBC, suggesting in a Nov. 15 interview that the network’s apology was insufficient “because they keep doing it again and again. They have painted a completely false picture of President Trump in Britain over a number of years. They’ve done the same thing about conservatives in our country.”
Pay the piper
Trump’s lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida and demands judgment against the BBC for at least $5 billion in damages, states:
The lack of any effort by the BBC to publish content even remotely resembling objective journalism, or to maintain even a slight semblance of objectivity in the Panorama Documentary, demonstrates that the BBC had no regard for the truth about President Trump, and that the doctoring of his Speech was not inadvertent, but instead was an intentional component of the BBC’s effort to craft as one-sided an impression and narrative against President Trump as possible.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told the Guardian that “President Trump’s powerhouse lawsuit is holding the BBC accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.”
A spokesperson for the network said in a statement, “As we have made clear previously, we will be defending this case.”
A spokesperson for the prime minister’s office noted that while Downing Street will always “defend the principle of a strong, independent BBC as a trusted and relied-upon national broadcaster reporting without fear or favor,” the prime minister’s office has “also consistently said it is vitally important that they act to maintain trust, correcting mistakes quickly when they occur.”
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