US regulator probes BBC over misleading Trump edit

LONDON: The BBC said Thursday that it had received a letter informing the British broadcaster that it was being investigated by the US communications regulator.

The BBC last week apologised for the editing of a speech that gave the impression US President Donald Trump had urged “violent action” ahead of the 2021 assault on the US Capitol. Trump has threatened a $5 billion lawsuit over the case.

In a letter to the BBC and two American broadcasters, Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said he was “writing to determine whether any FCC regulations have been implicated by the BBC’s misleading and deceptive conduct”.

Carr wrote in the letter, seen by AFP, that the broadcast by the BBC’s Panorama programme spliced together clips that were 54 minutes apart.

“In doing so, the BBC programme depicts President Trump voicing a sentence that, in fact, he never uttered,” he wrote.

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“That would appear to meet the very definition of publishing a materially false and damaging statement.”

The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and another top executive resigned this month over the case.

Trump’s supporters rioted at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a bid to overturn the certification of his 2020 US presidential election defeat by Democrat Joe Biden.

“While the BBC has apologized for its decision, stating that the program created what it now acknowledges was a ‘mistaken impression’, concerns remain,” Carr added in his letter.

He requested to know if the BBC had provided either video or audio of the spliced comments to either the PBS television channel or NPR radio in the United States.

Trump’s legal team said the edit had given a “false, defamatory, malicious, disparaging, and inflammatory” impression of what he said in his speech outside the White House.

A BBC spokesperson declined to comment on the US watchdog’s involvement but confirmed it had received the letter.

The corporation is funded in Britain by a licence fee payable by anyone who watches live television.

Trump is renowned for his confrontational approach to what he calls the “fake news.”