The BBC met some of Trump’s demands on Thursday when it issued a formal apology and retracted the broadcast, titled Trump: A Second Chance, which aired a week before the 2024 presidential election. That followed the surprise resignations of BBC director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness days earlier. But no compensation was offered.
‘Sincerely regrets’
“While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,” the broadcaster said in a statement.
US President Donald Trump would need to prove the BBC had acted with “actual malice” towards him.Credit: AP
The White House referred a request to comment to Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, who didn’t immediately respond to an email.
On Thursday, after the BBC apology, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said, “It is now clear that BBC engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump by intentionally and deceitfully editing his historic speech in order to try and interfere in the presidential election”.
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The BBC’s editing spliced together two parts of Trump’s speech before the riot in a way that gave the impression of a direct call for violence. While more than a thousand Trump supporters invaded the Capitol building, injuring 140 police officers and causing millions of dollars in damage, his speech never directly called for the attack.
The time limit for filing defamation lawsuits in the United Kingdom is one year, meaning it’s too late for Trump to sue there. His lawyer has said the suit will be filed in Florida.
Fighting the media
The case, if filed, would also have to surmount another legal standard that protected publications that were “substantially true”, Germain said. The remarks that were spliced together were both things Trump said, even if the edit was poorly done, he said.
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“I don’t think they should win a Pulitzer Prize for the editing, but it’s not defamatory,” Germain said. “What he’s alleging is that he doesn’t like the way they edited the video, he’s not alleging that they posted a deep fake or something.”
A lawsuit against the BBC would add to a growing list of complaints Trump has filed against news outlets he claims have treated him unfairly, including recent multibillion-dollar cases he has pending against The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, both of which deny wrongdoing.
CBS agreed to pay $US16 million to settle Trump’s suit accusing it of election interference over how the network’s 60 Minutes edited a quote from an interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris, which he claimed smoothed out a meandering answer. ABC paid a similar amount to settle a suit over news host George Stephanopoulos’s incorrect reference to Trump being “found liable for rape” in a suit by E. Jean Carroll, while the jury had only found him liable for sexual abuse. The jury had rejected Carroll’s rape claim.
Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York, said a lawsuit by Trump against the BBC would probably fail because the Supreme Court has long recognised “the importance of not chilling political speech with the threat of lawsuits”.
“It’s the entire foundation of the Supreme Court’s protection of free speech that threats of costly lawsuits could cause the media to censor itself, and this case is a dramatic example of that,” Zipursky said.
Bloomberg
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