BBC Apologises To Donald Trump Over Panorama Edit But Refuses To Pay Compensation

ByMF Jones

The BBC has issued an apology to Donald Trump just hours before the Friday deadline the President imposed on them.

Trump threatened to sue the BBC for $1 BILLION if they didn’t apologise and compensate him for a misleading edit in the Panorama documentary ‘Trump: A Second Chance?”, which aired last year.

However, while the BBC apologised to Trump, they have refused to pay compensation. Here’s the statement in full:

“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.

“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.

“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.”

(FILES) In this file photo taken on January 6, 2021 US President Donald Trump speaks to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House in Washington, DC. - Death threats, accusations of betrayal and censure by their local parties: for the six Republicans running for re-election after voting to impeach Donald Trump, the last 17 months have been a painful lesson in the perils of opposing an unforgiving leader. Ten out of 211 House Republicans backed the Democrats' ultimately unsuccessful bid to have Trump convicted in a Senate trial last year, believing he should be held accountable for inciting a deadly siege of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

So the BBC have apologised for the edit, but argue no compensation is due because Trump suffered no loss as a result (he was re-elected shortly after). In fact it’s the BBC who have come out of this with reputational damage; the state controlled media of America’s “closest ally” duping their population about things as basic as what the President of the United States said in a speech which is publicly available online for anyone to watch.

Of course this won’t have been the first time the BBC did something like this, but it’s probably the boldest example given that there was no way Trump was ever going to let it slide.

And so, with the apology, the saga should end here, but it won’t. Trump will want to take the BBC to the cleaners and milk the situation for all its worth. That could be interesting as he’s trying to sue them through a Florida court, and it’s unclear what jurisdiction a Florida court could have over the BBC especially when it comes to an edit in a TV programme that didn’t even air in the US.

Who knows, maybe Trump will gracefully accept the apology and move on with his life? Somehow, I doubt it.

For the time Trump ‘humiliated’ Keir Starmer at the Gaza peace summit, click HERE.

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