LONDON (AP) — Britain’s government was due to weigh in Tuesday on a feud between the BBC and U.S. President Donald Trump, who is threatening to sue the broadcaster over the way it edited a speech he made after losing the 2020 presidential election.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy was set to deliver a statement on the BBC crisis in the House of Commons, with critics demanding major changes to the corporation and supporters urging the government to defend the U.K.’s public broadcaster from political interference.
Outgoing BBC Director-General Tim Davie, who announced his resignation on Sunday because of the scandal, said the BBC needed “to fight for our journalism” in the face of growing attacks.
“We have made some mistakes that have cost us,” Davie acknowledged in a statement to staff, but added he was “fiercely proud” of the organization.
“I think we’ve got to fight for our journalism,” he said.
Trump threatens to sue
A lawyer for Trump is demanding a retraction, apology and compensation from the broadcaster over the allegedly defamatory sequence in a documentary broadcast last year.
Fallout from the documentary has already claimed the BBC’s top executive, Davie, and head of news Deborah Turness, who both resigned over what the broadcaster called an “error of judgment.”
The BBC has apologized for misleading editing of a speech Trump delivered on Jan. 6, 2021, before a crowd of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington.
Broadcast days before the November 2024 U.S. election, the documentary “Trump: A Second Chance?” spliced together three quotes from two sections of the speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.” Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
BBC chair Samir Shah said the broadcaster accepted “that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action.”
The BBC has not yet formally responded to the demand from Florida-based Trump attorney Alejandro Brito that it “retract the false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements,” apologize and “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused” by Friday, or face legal action for $1 billion in damages.
An embattled national institution
The publicly funded BBC is a century-old national institution under growing pressure in an era of polarized politics and changing media viewing habits.
Funded through an annual license fee of 174.50 pounds ($230) paid by all households who watch live TV or any BBC content, the broadcaster is frequently a political football, with conservatives seeing a leftist slant in its news output and some liberals accusing it of having a conservative bias.
Governments of both left and right have long been accused of meddling with the broadcaster, which is overseen by a board that includes both BBC nominees and government appointees.
Near the BBC’s London headquarters, some passersby said the scandal would further erode trust in a broadcaster already under pressure.
“They need to get their organization sorted so that in the future we can look at the BBC with confidence,” said retiree David Abraham.
Amanda Carey, a semi-retired lawyer, said the editing of the Trump speech is “something that should never have happened.
“The last few scandals that they’ve had, trust in the BBC is very much waning and a number of people are saying they’re going to refuse to pay the license (fee),” she said.
The center-left Labour Party government has backed the BBC, without criticizing Trump, while stressing the need for the broadcaster to quickly correct its errors to maintain public trust.
“If you look at the levels of trust people have in the BBC, it’s extraordinarily high,” local government minister Alison McGovern told LBC radio. “If they’ve made an editorial mistake, then they should apologize.”
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Associated Press journalist Kwiyeon Ha contributed to this story.