The BBC and Trump

The notion that the BBC's editing of Trump’s speech to his supporters on 6 January 2021 somehow ’defamed’ a man who clearly encouraged an insurrection against an elected US government is so ridiculous as to be laughable. you wouldn’t think it would make news anywhere. But it’s forced the resignation of the BBC Director General and the Head of News, and is getting wall-to-wall coverage in the British media. Trump is a fantasist, a felon and a congenital liar yet he’s threatening to sue the most trusted broadcaster in the world for a billion dollars, and you wouldn’t bet against him getting a settlement. What a world we're living in.

The editing may have given the impression he delivered a sentence that he didn’t, but does anyone seriously think the Panorama programme misled anybody about Trump’s underlying message and his leading contribution to the shocking events during Biden’s inauguration in 2021?  The programme aired on 28 October last year, but only now has it created a scandal after The Telegraph published an internal memo criticising, among other things, the editing of Trump's speech.

The programme has been withdrawn from the BBC iplayer while Trump is demanding an apology and ‘compensation’ by Friday, otherwise he will take legal action and sue the BBC for $1 billion.

I wouldn't worry. He will never do it. Avoiding a court case and a jury trial is the reason he ran for the presidency. Trump knows if it ever gets to court, BBC lawyers would question him under oath and subpoena everyone who knew anything about what happened on 6 January 2021 and the events leading up to that day. It would, in my opinion, destroy Trump. 

There is a lot of evidence that he colluded with the organisation of the rally and his campaign paid millions of dollars to assemble the crowd.

The charge from the leaked memo by Michael Prescott, an advisor to the editorial board, is that the "BBC Panorama programme 'doctored' a speech by Donald Trump to make it wrongly appear as though he directly called for violence on the day that his supporters stormed the US Capitol.

"This created the impression that Trump said something he did not and, in doing so, materially misled viewers."

The keyword is 'directly.' He may not have directly called for violence, but you would have to be a bit slow not to realise that this was the actual effect and the probable intent of the speech. Trump didn't concede the election gracefully, even though his aides had told him repeatedly that he had lost and his campaign's efforts in more than 60 legal challenges across the USA failed to uncover any outcome-changing fraud. 

Early on, the crowd was chanting: "Fight for Trump. Fight for Trump. Fight for Trump. Fight for Trump. Fight for Trump. Fight for Trump" to which he responded: "Thank you."  He himself used words like fight, fights and fighting twenty times.

If you read the text of the whole speech as delivered, I would argue that nobody was misled. What Panorama editors did was simply cut out 52 minutes of Trump ranting about how the 2020 election was stolen and generally firing up the crowd. As special prosecutor Jack Smith put it in his final report to Congress in January this year:

"In his remarks, Mr. Trump repeated many of the same lies he had been telling for months regarding dead voters, non-citizen voters, and vote dumps-and he told newer ones: lies that targeted states wanted to change their electors and that Mr. Pence had the authority, and might be persuaded, to change the election results. The lie regarding Mr. Pence was particularly deceptive because Mr. Trump knew what his supporters in the crowd did not: that Mr. Pence had just told him in no uncertain terms that he would not do what Mr. Trump was demanding."

Smith went on:

"Although Mr. Trump at one point also told his supporters to 'peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard,' he used the word 'fight' more than ten times in the speech before concluding by directing his supporters to march to the Capitol to give allied Members of Congress "the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country." He also told the angry crowd that 'if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. Throughout the speech, Mr. Trump gave his supporters false hope that through such action, they could cause Mr. Pence to overturn the election results, even improvising new lines directed at Mr. Pence as the speech went on."

Smith also alleged that Trump had told his advisors on the night of 5 January that the crowd at the Ellipse, a park to the south of the White House, the next day would be "angry."  Despite this, he continued to claim the election was stolen (it was "pure theft"), and he told the crowd, “we must stop the steal” and “together we will drain the Washington swamp.” 

I think his speech was partly pre-written for him. The phrase "peacefully and patriotically" doesn't sound like Trump to me, and neither does: "Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy," adding, ".. you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong." 

Trump said: “We can’t allow these people to illegally take over our country.”

Make up your own mind. Watch the full speech HERE. I think most reasonable people would say the edit simply got you from A to B and spared the viewer the best part of an hour of a typical bizarre Trump rant where he slowly cranked up the crowd with claims the election had been stolen. He ended with the "fight like hell" message that looked for all the world like an order to his followers before sending them off to the Capitol building, where all hell broke out.

He then went back to the White House, watched the violence on television, and for over three hours did nothing to stop the rioting.  

If I were the BBC, I would tell Trump to sue. They should defend the Panorama programme makers, acknowledge the editing might have been better, but claim in the light of what we know, it was fair comment and argue that the words in between the two parts of his speech that the BBC stitched together, were a direct, logical link and directly traceable to the violence that erupted later.

I think they would win easily. And Donald Trump knows it.