Nov. 14 (UPI) — The BBC has issued a retraction and a formal apology to U.S. President Donald Trump for edits made to a speech he gave ahead of the January 6 Capitol Hill riots. The edits made it appear as if he was inciting his supporters to violence.
BBC Chairman Samir Shah also penned a personal written apology to the White House. However, the BBC indicated it would not be paying compensation, as demanded by President Trump.
The retraction stated that an edition of Panorama titled *Trump: A Second Chance*, broadcast on October 28, 2024, used excerpts lifted from different parts of Trump’s speech in a way that inadvertently made it appear they were contiguous. In the BBC’s version, Trump was shown saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell,” when his actual words were, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
The BBC accepted that this edit “gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action” and offered an apology: “The BBC would like to apologize to President Trump for that error of judgment.”
However, the notice made no mention of compensation, which was one of President Trump’s key demands in a letter threatening the BBC with a $1 billion lawsuit. The letter alleged that the program had defamed him and gave the BBC a deadline of 5 p.m. EST on Friday to respond.
A BBC spokesman said the corporation strongly disagreed that “there is a basis for a defamation claim.” There was no immediate response from either the White House or Trump’s legal counsel.
The Panorama program was not an isolated incident. According to *The Telegraph*, the BBC’s *Newsnight* program did something very similar with the same speech in a broadcast in 2022.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said that, based on the latest revelation, it was “now clear that the BBC engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump” and accused the corporation of attempting to influence the outcome of the 2024 election.
The controversy has sparked a furious debate about editorial impartiality at the BBC, which is funded by a £229 annual license fee that every household with a TV must pay. This has prompted calls for an overhaul of the BBC’s internal processes and procedures.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy acknowledged that the BBC’s editorial rules were “in some cases not robust enough and in other cases not consistently applied.” She also appeared to suggest that the replacement for director-general Tim Davie, who resigned Sunday, should come from a journalism background. Davie spent the first half of his career as a senior marketing executive at PepsiCo before joining the BBC’s marketing division.
The opposition Conservative Shadow Culture Secretary, Nigel Huddleston, stated he was waiting to see if Trump accepted the BBC’s response as the “fulsome apology” he was entitled to receive.
“I do not want the British license fee payer or the rest of the BBC to pay the price for poor editorial decisions made by BBC journalists,” Huddleston said in a post on X. “However, we would all be in a better position if the BBC had never made these errors in the first place. The BBC needs a fundamental review of processes and procedures to ensure that such failures in impartiality never happen again.”
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2025/11/14/Trump-receives-apology-from-BBC/9561763112533/