US President Donald Trump has declared that he intends to proceed with legal action against the BBC despite the British public service broadcaster apologising to him for the way his speech was edited for one of its news documentaries aired last year. “We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and 5 billion dollars, probably sometime next week,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One overnight on Saturday. “We have to do it, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. Not that they couldn’t have not done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth,” he said.
The row follows an intense period for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), resulting in the resignation of top officials and an apology for an “error of judgment” from its Indian-origin chair, Samir Shah. On Thursday, the BBC said the edit of Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech had unintentionally given “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action” and said it would not be broadcast again. Trump had threatened to sue the broadcaster for $1 billion in damages unless the corporation issued a retraction, apology and paid him compensation. Over 50 minutes later in the speech, he said: “And we fight.
We fight like hell.” However, the programme showed him saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” Controversy around how Trump’s speech was edited has led to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness. “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 Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” a BBC statement stated.
