Trump says he will take legal action against BBC after apology

After the corporation apologised but refUSed to compensate US President Donald Trump, he has stated that he would take legal action against the BBC over how his speech was edited by Panorama. On Friday evening, Trump said,

We'll sue them for anything between $1bn [£759 million] and $5 billion], most likely sometime next week. The BBC announced on Thursday that the edit of the 6 January 2021 speech had mistakenly given

the incorrect belief that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action" and that it would not be broadcast again. The corporation apologised to the president but confirmed that it would not pay financial compensation.

After Trump's attorneys threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion in fees unless the corporation issued a retractance, apology, and paid him compensation, the BBC released the statement. Trump told reporters that he must take court action.

They cheated. The words that came out of my mouth were modified by the authors.

The president said he did not raise the issue with Sir Keir Starmer, but that the prime minister had requested to speak to him. Over the weekend, Trump said he'd call Starmer. No lawsuit had been filed in federal or state court in Florida as of Friday evening, according to a search of public court record databases.

If you don't do it, you don’t prevent it from happening again with other people,

Trump said in a separate interview on Saturday before his remarks on Air Force One. "He referred to a controversy with US news outlet CBS over an interview with his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris. ParaphrasedOutput: In July this year, US media company Paraphrase Globalagreed decided to pay $16 million (£ 5 m) to resolve a court dispute over the interview.

The controversy arises from the way in which Trump's 6 January 2021 address was edited by Panorama for a documentary that aired in October 2024.

We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're coming to celebrate our brave senators and congressmen and women.

And we fight,

the speaker said more than 50 minutes later. We fight like hell.

We're going to walk down to the Capitol,'

the clip from the Panorama program shows him saying. and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.

The controversy surrounding how Trump's speech was edited has resulted in the departures of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness. The Panorama programme had been reviewed after criticism of how Trump's speech had been edited, according to the BBC's Corrections and Clarifications section, which was published on Thursday evening.

We admit that our editor mistakenly created the impression that we were showing a single continuous portion of the speech rather than excerpts from various points in the speech,

the statement said. A BBC spokesperson revealed this week that lawyers for the BBC have written to Trump's legal team.

BBC Chair Samir Shah has personally sent President Trump a letter stating that he and the organization are sorry for the editing of the president's address on January 20, 2021, which was not included in the program,

they wrote.

While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree that there is no basis for a defamation charge.

The BBC laid out five main arguments in a letter to Trump's legal team, stating that it did not have a case to answer. First, the BBC did not have the rights to, and did not, broadcast the Panorama episode on its US channels, according to the BBC. When the documentary was released on BBC iPlayer, it was limited to viewers in the United Kingdom. It was stated in the second that the documentary did not cause Trump harm because he was re-elected shortly after. The clip was not meant to deceive, according to the third party, but it was just meant to shorten a long speech, and that the editor was not done with malice. It said, fourthly, that the clip was never meant to be considered in isolation. Rather, it was 12 seconds within an hour-long program that featured a slew of voices in favor of Trump. Also, under defamation laws in the United States, a public interest and political speech are heavily covered. The BBC's apology came just hours after the Daily Telegraph revealed a second similarly edited clip that was broadcast on Newsnight in 2022.