US President Donald Trump has announced he intends to sue the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for up to $5 billion, following what he described as the “corrupt” and “cheated” edit of his January 6, 2021 speech.
Speaking aboard Air Force One on Friday evening and quoted by NBC News, Trump declared, “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1bn and $5bn, probably sometime next week.”
He added, “I think I have to do it. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”
The controversy centers on the BBC’s flagship program “Panorama,” which spliced together two separate moments from Trump’s speech - his call for supporters to walk to the Capitol and, over 50 minutes later, the line “We fight. We fight like hell” - creating the impression they were delivered consecutively.
On Thursday evening, the BBC published a correction acknowledging that the edit “gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” and confirmed the segment would not be rebroadcast. However, the broadcaster denied defamation and refused to pay damages.
BBC Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House expressing regret over the edit. A spokesperson stated: “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 controversy has already led to the resignations of BBC Director General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness.
In a Fox News interview which aired on Tuesday, Trump said when asked if he would sue the British broadcaster, “I think I have an obligation to do it because you can't allow people to do that. They defrauded the public and they've admitted it.”
In addition to the incident involving Trump’s speech, the BBC has continuously come under fire over its anti-Israel bias, which has reared its head even more since October 7, 2023.
In November of 2023, the corporation published an apology after falsely claiming that IDF troops were targeting medical teams in battles in and around the Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
Before that, the BBC falsely accused Israel of being responsible for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza, which the IDF proved was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket. The network later acknowledged that “it was false to speculate” on the explosion.
Earlier this year, the BBC faced mounting scrutiny for using the son of a senior Hamas official as a narrator in its documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.”
Following the criticism, the British broadcaster acknowledged that there were “serious flaws” in the program.
Several weeks ago, the BBC issued an apology after internal backlash over an email sent to staff referring to Hamas’s October 7 massacre as an “escalation.”