If the BBC thought it had placated Donald Trump and threats of a billion dollar lawsuit with an apology over its misleading documentary edit, POTUS made it clear tonight, that’s not happening
Despite getting the atonement he requested from the UK public broadcaster over a spliced clip that ran last year of his infamous Eclipse speech of January 6, 2021, Trump can’t or won’ let the Beeb’s admitted “error of judgement” go.
“We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week,” a chatty Trump told reporters tonight traveling from the nation’s capitol to his Mar-A-Lago estate on Air Force One. “Well I think I have to do it.”
Revealed in an internal BBC report that ended up recently in the hands of the Daily Telegraph, the section of the docu took two parts of Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech to MAGA supporters and seamlessly edited them together. The result lacked a flash or any indication the words were spoken by Trump over 50 minutes apart. The 2024 Panorama documentary aired just before the Election Day face-off between of the ex-Apprentice host/former POTUS and then sitting Vice President Kamala Harris.
Though it raised few eyebrows at the time of broadcast, the impression was the then-2020 election result contesting POTUS was advocating violence with words of “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
Having squeezed the likes of ABC/Disney and CBS/Paramount for tens of millions since Trump returned to power and gone after Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Times too, lawyers for the first convicted felon POTUS earlier this week sent the BBC a stark salvo. The letter said Trump would be filing a $1 billion legal action in Florida if they didn’t get a strong sorry, a retraction and some cash by November 14.
Trying to deflect questions on his relationship with deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and asked about a potential US military strike on Venezuela, Trump clearly had those past media pay-outs on his mind Friday as he jetted down to the Sunshine State. “They even admitted that they cheated,” he said to the press. “They changed the words coming out of my mouth. That’s worse than what CBS did with Kamala.”
Aboard Air Force One tonight, the Chief US correspondent for the Telegraph, which saw Paramount board member Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital pull the plug Friday on their second go-round at buying the broadsheet, caught the moment — and got a compliment from Trump
Already reeling from the edit fallout leading to the sudden resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness, the BBC apologized to POTUS on Thursday over the edited clip that appeared in Trump: A Second Chance?.
“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,” the Samir Shah chaired public broadcaster said in a November 13 statement. “The BBC would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgement. This programme was not scheduled to be re-broadcast and will not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms.”
As another incident of a Trump speech edit by the Beeb emerged, Shah also sent an apology letter directly to the White House too, reps for the BBC said.
In both missives, the broadcaster stated the Panorama documentary had never aired in the USA ands they rejected any notion that Trump had a legit defamation case. Under political pressure from Parliament, pundits and public opinion in the UK, plus internal divisions, the BBC made it clear the apology and shuttering of the documentary was enough in their opinion and Trump wouldn’t be getting a check from them.
The rebuttal shows the BBC missed the mark with Trump, who always takes everything personally and always wants to be paid – – as he made clear tonight.
