Donald Trump said he felt he had an “obligation” to edit one of his speeches, as a deadline to respond to his billion-dollar legal threat.
The President of the US accused the broadcaster of having “deceived the public” in an edition of the panorama last year, referring to the two sides of a speech he made on the 6th of Friday in response.
This can be seen as one of the main reasons for the shock restitution on Sunday by Tim Davie, Director of the BBC, and Deborah Torness, the Head of BBC News.
The BBC apologized for the edit, concluding that it “gave the impression that President Trump was making a direct call for violent action”. It now has a main dilemma on how to react to the legal threat, made by a court in Florida.
Trump doubled down on his legal challenge to the BBC. “I think I have an obligation to do it, you can’t let people do that,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “I think I should. They rejected the public and they admitted it. It is within our allies allies, so our allies are good.
“That was a very sad event. They changed my speech on January 6 into a beautiful speech, which was a calming speech, and they made it sound radical.
“They showed me the consequences of how they stopped it. It was dishonest and people’s heads stopped and a lot of people stopped.”
The documentary, broadcast a week before the US Election, combined clips of a speech Trump made in the Capitol, “We will fight in the Capitol, and we will fight.”
The words were taken from sections of his speech about an hour apart.
Legal experts have questioned the Trump Team’s chances of victory in any court case, given Florida’s liberal libel laws and the fact that the Panorama Episode is not available in the state.
However, the BBC will have to weigh whether it wants to fight such a public battle, while other US-based broadcasters are set up in court. Given it is funded by the License Fee, any settlement with the BBC would be politically toxic.
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Editing is one of the corporate criticisms raised in a memo by Michael Prescott, a former independent editorial board and EGSC). He left the role in the summer.
There is anger within the BBC over the Trump programme, after outgoing senior editors were challenged about the editing in the past months, but did not act to put it right.
However, there is also concern over the political nature of the Price Memo, which has drawn a series of claims of liberal bias over the years. The BBC says some of the issues are historical, while serious action has already been taken in relation to others.
Prescott said there was no political motivation in his memo.