President Trump has gotten an apology from the BBC for their mis-editing of his January 6, 2021, speech, but he says that isn’t good enough:
President Trump said he would sue the BBC next week for between $1 billion and $5 billion after the corporation apologised for a misleading edit of his speech on January 6, 2021, but declined to pay damages.
Trump said he planned to speak with Sir Keir Starmer about the issue over the weekend after the prime minister had attempted to reach the president. Trump said Starmer was “very embarrassed” by the incident.
I don’t doubt it.
“They changed the words coming out of my mouth. That’s worse than what CBS did with Kamala,” he added, referring to the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris by CBS’s 60 Minutes during the election campaign.
Did the BBC change Trump’s words? I don’t think so. I understand that they ran together two sentences that were actually nearly an hour apart in the speech, so as to make it sound as though Trump was encouraging his listeners to riot. And they left out the part where he said to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” The BBC admits they did wrong, but denies that it was defamatory:
The BBC said: “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.”
I think the BBC is probably right about that. Trump had a good defamation case against George Stephanopoulos and ABC because Stephanopoulos said a jury found that Trump raped Jean Carroll. Actually, the jury found that Trump did not rape Carroll. (Her claim was absurd on its face.) So Stephanopoulos flat-out lied about an easily verifiable question of fact. It was not a matter of opinion or judgment.
What the BBC did is more akin to 60 Minutes’ offense. It engaged in misleading editing to try to damage a political opponent. But the clips of Trump were genuine, and, while the impression the BBC show gave was clearly misleading, there was no flat-out lie as in the ABC case. Putting a political opponent in a bad light is not defamation.
So I don’t think Trump will win his case. (I assume he will sue in Florida, and U.S.law will apply.) But he may well get a modest–under the circumstances–settlement, as he did in the CBS case. It is good to see the press paying a price for its misdeeds, and Trump may get some revealing internal BBC documents in discovery. But I would hate to see Trump go all the way to trial and lose, thereby, liberals would claim, vindicating their January 6 narrative.
