Earlier on Thursday, the BBC was accused of another misleading edit of Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech, two years before the Panorama sequence aired.
On a Newsnight programme from 2022, the edit is a little different from Panorama.
Trump is shown as saying: “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 fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
This was followed by a voiceover from presenter Kirsty Wark saying “and fight they did” over footage from the Capitol riots.
Responding to the clip on the same programme, former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who quit a diplomatic post and became a critic of Trump after describing the 6 January riots as an “attempted coup”, said the video had “spliced together” Trump’s speech.
“That line about ‘we fight and fight like hell’ is actually later in the speech and yet your video makes it look like those two things came together,” he said.
In response to Thursday’s story in the Telegraph, a BBC spokesperson said the BBC holds itself to the “highest editorial standards” and the matter was being looked into.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team told the Telegraph it was “now clear that BBC engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump”.
Concerns over the Trump Panorama documentary emerged when a leaked internal memo, written by a former independent external adviser to the corporation’s editorial standards committee, was published by the Telegraph newspaper, external. Among other things, the document also criticised the BBC’s reporting of trans issues, and BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war.
