Washington Examiner Senior Writer Joe Concha said the edits the BBC made to video of President Donald Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, 2021, were defamation, and that the network needs to take responsibility.
“This was a pseudo half-baked apology,” Concha said. “Two top executives at the BBC have resigned as result of this blatant action, so this apology just ain’t going to do it if they truly aren’t taking responsibility for what this news organization — that by the way has existed basically since the end of World War I — did.”
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The network issued an apology to Trump on Thursday for the deceptive editing of his speech. It denied the president’s defamation claim.
Trump threatened to file a $1 billion lawsuit against the BBC over the edited clips of his speech, giving the network until 5 p.m. Friday to retract the “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” about him, according to a Sunday letter.
Concha said the BBC edited two clips, which were originally over 50 minutes apart, together to suggest that Trump led a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, omitting the sections of his speech about protesting “peacefully” and “patriotically.”
Concha said Trump should follow through with his lawsuit.
“The feeling here is that the BBC will eventually settle the way ABC did, the way CBS did, and other news organizations have because accountability matters,” he said.
Concha said this isn’t the first time the BBC has shown its “overwhelming bias.”
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“During the Israel-Hamas war alone, the BBC had to issue, I mean get this, 215 corrections to its reporting, nearly two per week since Oct. 7, 2023,” Concha said. “So almost in every case, the bias was against Israel, much like it was here in the United States by the New York Times.”
Concha said the BBC is a news organization with “serious problems,” and that it is “on the hook here.”