President Trump awaits a response from the BBC to his $1 billion lawsuit threat amidst a controversy that has led to the resignation of two senior executives for a leak that shows the BBC selectively edited and omitted language that makes President Trump look like he was inciting violence on his Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol speech.
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00:00And President Trump now awaits a response from the BBC to his $1 billion lawsuit threat
00:05amid a controversy that has led to the resignation of two senior executives at the BBC
00:10and has led to the public broadcaster's chairman apologizing.
00:14The controversy is over intentionally edited as well as omitted language
00:18from Trump's January 6th, 2021 speech on the day of the Capitol breach.
00:22The omission intentionally removes the key words, quote,
00:26to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
00:30And it splices together two soundbites that appeared almost one hour apart
00:35as if they were continuous language in Trump's speech.
00:38The result? The altered language taken out of context gives the viewer the impression
00:43that Trump intentionally incited violence on that day.
00:46Joining us now for analysis from London is Lee Hall.
00:49He's the host of NTD's British Thought Leaders.
00:52Lee, thank you so much for joining us this morning or your afternoon.
00:55What were your initial thoughts to this story?
00:58Great to be back, Kerry. I wasn't surprised by this.
01:02I think something like this had to happen, and I think more will happen.
01:05Britain's mainstream media, in my humble opinion, has been biased against Donald Trump for over 10 years.
01:11Now he's the most powerful man in the world, and they're in a bit of a pickle.
01:15Let me give you a few of some background.
01:17At the time of my parents, even when I was younger, there wasn't this choice of TV and radio.
01:22That was BBC. You watched it as a child, as a senior, whether you like sports, finance, cooking,
01:27whatever your taste, the BBC would cater for you.
01:30So we grew up trusting and loving the BBC.
01:33It's Britain's finest export perspective worldwide for being unbiased and fair.
01:38So something like this is just a bombshell, really, to a British person.
01:43If you can't trust the BBC, then who can you trust?
01:47Yeah, it is quite surprising that the intentionality in trying to change the meaning of what were direct quotes in a speech.
01:55But the thing that I don't understand is, you know, why is this surfacing now?
02:01OK, so in June, Michael Prescott, who's a former standards advisor to the BBC,
02:07he sent this 19-page memo to the BBC board, and then he stepped down.
02:12He criticized the BBC's editing.
02:14President Trump's January the 6th speech said it's completely misleading.
02:17And he wrote of his despair, an action by the BBC executive over widespread evidence of bias.
02:24So he talked about transgender issues.
02:26He talked about Israel.
02:28So Britain's Telegraph newspaper, they got hold of this memo, and they've recently broke the story.
02:32It's been enormous.
02:34And we've seen the fallout already.
02:35The director general has gone.
02:37The news CEO has resigned.
02:39So they've fallen on their swords, but they still deny there's any institutional bias.
02:44I think it's also worth reflecting on the financial side of this.
02:48In Britain, you have to pay the BBC license fee.
02:51If I buy a TV just to watch you guys on NTD and don't watch BBC, I'll still have to pay this $230 a year license fee.
02:59People are a bit fed up.
03:01They see it as an unfair tax.
03:03And the BBC has seen the income from the license fee down 30% over the last 15 years.
03:08So they turned to America as a way to solve this cash flow problem, rolled out a subscription service in June in the U.S.
03:17Now the White House is talking about banning BBC reporters, and this is a serious problem for them.
03:23Yeah, such an interesting turn of events.
03:26Yesterday, we played a reaction from Nigel Farage.
03:29He's the leader of the Reform UK Party.
03:30He said the timing of this documentary, with the misleading editing, it amounts to election interference.
03:38What was Farage referring to?
03:41Well, this documentary with the edited January the 6th clip was released in October 2024.
03:48So that's just before the U.S. election.
03:51And this was released by Panorama, which is BBC's flagship documentary maker, most trusted program, really.
03:57And yet it gave the impression that Donald Trump's directly inciting violence ahead of what happened at the Capitol on January the 6th.
04:04But he wasn't.
04:06And the BBC is this powerful international organization releasing something like this ahead of an election could have a serious impact.
04:14So, as you mentioned, the chair apologized, called it an error of judgment, misled the viewers.
04:21I think if President Trump had lost that election, this would have just got lost in the kind of annals of history.
04:25But he didn't.
04:27And the things went a different way.
04:28And now the BBC has made his bed and is kind of lying in it.
04:32Yeah, it's so interesting.
04:34We, as you mentioned, it seems like they're coming to the U.S.
04:39not only for offering a subscription service to help with their own cash flows,
04:43but we see an unusual courting of President Trump by the royal family.
04:49There's been a lot of pomp and circumstance for him to come and visit, I presume, in an effort to, you know, keep relations strong.
04:58And Trump has said himself that, you know, we have no greater partner than Britain for the United States.
05:06So how does this then play into that, being, as you mentioned, that, you know, the BBC is really not separate of the British government?
05:13Yeah, and that's kind of the main issue here.
05:16The BBC is not some kind of private organization doing what it wants to do.
05:20It's funded by money collected from the taxpayers.
05:23And, you know, it has a constitution that's overseen by the government, et cetera.
05:28So it's really important what the BBC says and does.
05:32If you've got part of Britain, such as our prime minister or our royal family,
05:36trying to improve connections with the U.S. administration and with President Trump particularly,
05:42and at the same time you've got the BBC doing things that are seen as a bit kind of unethical, to say the least,
05:49then that's quite a serious problem to deal with, really, two kind of opposing factions almost.
05:54Yeah, Lee, and then another incident that came up was when a bombing at a Gaza hospital happened.
06:01The BBC was quick to report that Israel carried out the attack, but it turned out it was friendly fire
06:07and it was actually Hamas terrorists who blew up their own hospital.
06:11The BBC leadership had said that this was a one-off incident with Trump, but here we see another incident.
06:17So is there a systemic problem within the BBC?
06:21And if so, how does it get addressed?
06:24Yeah, I would completely agree with you.
06:27There's a systemic problem, and addressing it will be very difficult.
06:31In the editing of the president's speech, it's kind of the straw that broke the camel's back.
06:36I mean, it's a big straw, the poor camel.
06:37This is a $1 billion lawsuit, but there's loads of other issues before this.
06:42You mentioned Israel and Gaza.
06:44There's ongoing accusations of biased BBC reporting there.
06:48There was a documentary, BBC documentary on Gaza, breached the Afghan broadcasting rules and was removed.
06:55It was narrated by the son of a Hamas minister, and the BBC didn't disclose that.
07:00Hamas is banned in the UK by the government's terrorists.
07:03BBC refuses to call them terrorists.
07:05Dame Priti Patel, who is a member of parliament, former government minister, she is demanding the government review funding of BBC's Arabic service.
07:15She says it's so biased, it risks becoming the Hamas broadcasting service instead of the British broadcasting service.
07:20And then there's all the gender issue stuff.
07:24So we've got gender-critical campaigners sending a letter to the BBC board saying the BBC's normalisation of transgender ideology has had real harmful consequences.
07:34There's lots of positive stories about drag queens.
07:36There's very little about what detransitioners have been through, for example.
07:41Going back to Mr. Prescott's memo that started this whole situation,
07:44he said the BBC's transgender coverage was subject to censorship by this specialist LGBT reporter team who just refused to cover gender-critical stories.
07:55So I think, as with many parts of our society, the BBC has been subject to this ideological shift in many areas.
08:02It's going to be really difficult for them to get out of this.
08:05Well, these are very much surprising revelations.
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