LONDON — President Donald Trump has said he has an obligation to proceed with his threatened $1 billion lawsuit against the BBC for editing a speech he made before his supporters' violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the presidential election result.
The BBC's top executive, Director-General Tim Davie, and its news CEO, Deborah Turness, resigned Sunday amid a growing scandal over this and other alleged editorial misjudgments.
Trump celebrated the news, though his legal team also wrote to the corporation on Sunday demanding a “full and fair retraction” and gave a deadline of 5 p.m. Friday for a response. A BBC spokesperson said: "We will review the letter and respond directly in due course."
The issue has become a major story in the U.K. where Prime Minister Keir Starmer told lawmakers at the weekly Prime Minister's Questions session in parliament on Wednesday: "I believe in a strong and independent BBC. Some would rather the BBC didn't exist ... I'm not one of them."
He added, however, that "where mistakes are made they do need to get their house in order."
Starmer was responding to Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, who asked whether the government would urge the BBC to fight Trump's lawsuit.
Davey said "a great British institution is under attack from a foreign government ... Trump has underlined press freedom in America and now he's trying to do the same here."
Asked Tuesday night whether he would sue, Trump told Fox News: "Well, I guess I have to you know, why not? Because they defrauded the public, and they've admitted it."
"I think I have an obligation to do it, because you can't get people, you can't allow people to do that," he said, before comparing the action to his lawsuit against CBS for a "60 Minutes" interview with his then-presidential election rival Kamala Harris. CBS paid $16 million to settle the case.
Trump complained that the BBC's edit of his speech "made it sound radical" when it was "a very calming speech."
The saga centers on a "Panorama" documentary that aired before last year's election.
In it, two parts of the speech were edited together to give the impression that Trump said: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol... and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell."
In fact Trump initially said: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them."
He said later: "And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
The House Jan. 6 committee said after an 18-month investigation that Trump spent much of the speech at the Washington rally “amping up his crowd with lies about the election, attacking his own vice-president and Republican members of Congress, and exhorting the crowd to fight.”
BBC Chairman Samir Shah has apologized for what he called an "error of judgement" as the furor intensifies the debate over the embattled broadcaster’s future.
Davie told staff in a 40-minute all-hands meeting Tuesday that despite mistakes the corporation had to “fight for our journalism,” BBC News reported.
Trump also told Fox News he took offense at this coming from "one of our great allies," meaning the United Kingdom.
The BBC is a public corporation funded by a national license fee of 174.50 pound ($228) per household, but it is editorially independent and frequently runs critical and revealing news stories about the government of the day.
The incident and other claims of biased reporting have provided potent fuel for conservative critics of the BBC, including many lawmakers and right-wing newspapers who oppose the license fee and accuse the corporation of being culturally liberal and institutionally biased.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told Parliament Tuesday that the BBC is a "national institution" and warned against a sustained attack. The ten-year charter that governs the BBC, including its funding, is due for renewal in 2027.
