The BBC has come under intense scrutiny over a Panorama documentary, titled Trump: A Second Chance?, which aired shortly before the 2024 US presidential election.
An edit included in the documentary spliced together parts of a speech made by Trump on 6 January 2021 in a way that made it look like he was explicitly urging people to attack the US Capitol.
In his speech in Washington DC, Trump said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
However, in the Panorama edit he was shown saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The two sections of the speech were delivered nearly an hour apart – with the “fight like hell” comment taken from a section where Trump discussed how “corrupt” US elections were.
In total, he used the words “fight” or “fighting” 20 times.
The documentary aired last year but came to prominence this month when a leaked internal BBC memo which raised concerns about the edit was published by the Telegraph newspaper, external.
The memo was written by Michael Prescott, an external editorial advisor to the BBC’s editorial standards committee. It said Panorama had produced a “distortion of the day’s events” which would leave viewers asking: “Why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?”
The fallout to the memo’s emergence has led to BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness resigning from their positions.
Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn (£760m) unless he receives a full retraction, apology and compensation.
On Monday, BBC chair Samir Shah apologised for an “error of judgement” over the documentary.