While Britain’s state broadcaster apologized to the president for the way it edited his speech, it said it would not offer financial compensation, as Trump has demanded. Two of the BBC’s top executives, Director General Tim Davie and its news chief, Deborah Turness, resigned over the incident and accusations of biased coverage. BBC chair Samir Shah sent a personal apology Thursday to the White House.
Trump has launched a flurry of lawsuits against publications and media companies he has accused of being unfriendly and defamatory, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC and Paramount. In July, Paramount agreed to settle a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris on CBS news program “60 Minutes” that the president said was deceptively edited, paying him $16 million.
The crux of Trump’s BBC complaint is a segment in which footage in the Panorama show was selectively edited to suggest, incorrectly, that the U.S. president had told supporters: “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 in fact spliced from sections of the speech almost an hour apart, and omitted a section in which Trump had said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”