At best, the video editing is sloppy. At worst the cuts are a deliberate attempt to harm Donald Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 election.
A legal complaint in a US court followed, in tandem with a demand for a massive payout to make matters right.
This scenario will be painfully familiar to the BBC but it actually played out months ago at CBS, its sister network in the US. The broadcaster eventually agreed to pay $16m (£12.1m) to make its Trump problem go away.
As the BBC waits for the US president’s lawyers to decide whether to launch a threatened billion-dollar lawsuit against the corporation, the experience of American news organisations offers different lessons about whether to fight or fold.
American legal experts say Mr Trump has no chance of winning a case against the BBC but the corporation still has a huge political problem, as media organisations try to navigate a changed media landscape.
Mr Trump was more likely to win $1bn with a lottery ticket, said Gregory Germain, professor at the Syracuse University College of Law.
He said the case would fail the test of whether or not the report was factually false.
“No, the facts were not false,” he said. “Editing video to change the order of quotes to make a point is what video editors do every day.”
But that is not the only issue. Nor does it mean that the BBC should not change, said Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a Trump confidant.
“The best defence is a good offence, get out in front of the story, admit the mistakes. Don’t do what US media does by doubling down on their bias,” he said. “Create a real advisory group from all political sides to make sure reports are fair, balanced and accurate.”
At issue is a video of Mr Trump’s Jan 6 speech, just before his supporters stormed the Capitol in 2021.
The edited version shows him apparently urging a crowd to walk up to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”
In fact, it comprises two completely separate parts of the speech and omits his message to make their voices heard “peacefully”.
On Thursday, the BBC apologised to the president and retracted the Panorama report. But it said the editing was not defamatory and it would not pay compensation.
Mr Trump fired back a day later. “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion dollars probably sometime next week,” he told The Telegraph aboard Air Force One.
Credit: White House pool
The Telegraph revealed the BBC Newsnight programme also doctored footage of the Donald Trump speech.
The BBC has reportedly told Mr Trump’s lawyers that he has no case, because the Panorama programme did not air in the US.
In a strong response to his legal threat, the broadcaster argued that it did not have the rights to show it in the US and that American audiences were also unable to watch it online via iPlayer because it was “geo-blocked”.
The BBC, The Times reported, has also claimed that Mr Trump did not suffer “overwhelming, reputational harm” as a result of the clip because he went onto win the 2024 presidential election.
The president’s lawyers have signalled they are ready to lodge a suit in Florida. The location is significant. It is where wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker after the website published an excerpt from a sex tape.
Hogan won, bankrupting Gawker in the process.
Since then, it has been cited as an example of how Florida is an easier place to win defamation cases than elsewhere in the US, where freedom of speech considerations usually carry the day, particularly when public figures are involved.
Wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker after the website published an excerpt from a sex tape – John Pendygraft/Getty Images
Even so, most legal experts say Mr Trump would have a hard time demonstrating his reputation was damaged by a programme that was not widely disseminated in the US.
But lack of merit doesn’t mean a case won’t follow.
“Pardon me for laughing,” said Michael J. Socolow, professor of communication and journalism, at the University of Maine. “I don’t mean to be dismissive, but there was no merit in the Stephanopoulos complaint, the CBS complaint …”
Last year, ABC News settled a defamation suit for $15m after George Stephanopoulos, its star anchor, falsely said the president had been found “liable for rape”.
ABC News settled a defamation suit for $15m involving its star anchor George Stephanopoulos – Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock
The CBS News case is striking in its similarities to the BBC. It was accused of deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris, Mr Trump’s 2024 election opponent.
One version of the interview removed chunks of what her critics call “word salad,” tidying up some of her rambling.
Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, eventually paid $16m to settle a lawsuit that many outside lawyers deemed “frivolous”.
Many of its own journalists were outraged, but the deal removed a different headache: A legal hurdle to the company’s takeover by Skydance.
The new owners quickly installed a new head at CBS News. Bari Weiss, an iconoclastic critic of “woke” culture who had risen to prominence with the Free Press, signalled a pivot to less confrontational coverage of the president.
Within months it won an interview with Mr Trump for its 60 Minutes show – the very same programme accused of doctoring the words of Ms Harris to show her in a more flattering light.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has pursued a more aggressive tack.
Its reporters are currently banned from travelling on Air Force One as it fights a $10bn action accusing it of a “deliberate smear campaign” for the way it reported the president’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Last week, a White House official told The Telegraph that the BBC’s reporters could face similar sanctions.
Another calculation would be whether the BBC wants to spend licence fee-payers’ money on what could still be a lengthy legal case.
Most civil cases in the US are settled before reaching court to avoid spending millions of dollars on lawyers’ fees, and to avoid embarrassing internal communications being unearthed during “discovery”, a deeper dive than the handover of relevant documents called “disclosure” in the UK.
It all means that the facts of the case are only a part of the dilemma facing the BBC, said Prof Socolow.
A lawsuit – if and when it arrived – would put it in a no-win situation, he said.
“If they fight the Trump lawsuit (when it’s filed), that validates the charge that it has a bias against the American president,” he said. “If they settle, like CBS and ABC, it hands cash from the British citizenry directly to an American president.”
It’s less a legal problem, he added, than a political problem.
“They need a very, very sophisticated political persuasion campaign much more than they need a sophisticated legal defence,” he said.
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