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United States President Donald Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn over an edited clip that has plunged the broadcaster into a public relations crisis and prompted the resignations of two top executives.<\/p>\n
In a letter sent to the BBC, Trump\u2019s legal team has demanded the retraction of \u201cfalse, defamatory, disparaging, misleading, and inflammatory statements\u201d contained in a Panorama documentary aired a week before the 2024 US presidential election.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n The letter, written by Trump\u2019s lawyer Alejandro Brito, gives the BBC until Friday to provide a \u201cfull and fair\u201d retraction of the documentary and \u201cappropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused\u201d, or face legal action in the US state of Florida.<\/p>\n \u201cThe BBC is on notice. PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY,\u201d says the letter, which was widely circulated on social media.<\/p>\n The BBC did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n Despite his legal threat, Trump would find it difficult to prove defamation in the US, where the 1st Amendment provides expansive protections of speech.<\/p>\n Kyu Ho Youm, a 1st Amendment expert at the University of Oregon, said he was \u201cvery doubtful\u201d that Trump would be able to succeed in a suit against the BBC.<\/p>\n \u201cInsofar as what I can tell, the broadcast seems to be factually truthful. Hence, there\u2019s not much falsity in the broadcast,\u201d Youm told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s no actionable falsity, 1st Amendment law is irrelevant. By the way, what\u2019s Trump\u2019s reputation? By every measure, he is more or less \u2018libel-proof\u2019 as a convicted felon.\u201d<\/p>\n US courts are also barred from enforcing foreign judgements that are incompatible with the 1st Amendment, Youm said, limiting Trump\u2019s ability to take a case in a more plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction such as the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no chance that the judgement will be enforced, simply because the SPEECH Act of 2010 prohibits it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The BBC documentary, titled Trump: A Second Chance?, has been mired in controversy since the leak of an internal memo that criticised producers for editing Trump\u2019s remarks to make it appear that he had directly encouraged the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.<\/p>\n In the documentary, Trump is shown saying, \u201cWe fight like hell\u201d, directly after telling supporters, \u201cWe\u2019re going to walk down to the Capitol\u201d.<\/p>\n Trump had actually followed his comments about going to the Capitol with a remark about cheering on \u201cour brave senators and congressmen and women\u201d, and made his \u201cfight like hell\u201d comment nearly an hour later.<\/p>\n The memo, written by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC\u2019s standards committee, also accused the broadcaster of suppressing critical coverage of transgender issues and displaying anti-Israel bias within the BBC Arabic service.<\/p>\n The BBC\u2019s director-general, Tim Davie, and its head of news, Deborah Turness, stepped down on Sunday amid the fallout of the controversy.<\/p>\n Trump welcomed the resignations in a post on Truth Social, accusing the BBC executives of being \u201ccorrupt\u201d and \u201cvery dishonest people\u201d.<\/p>\n BBC chair Samir Shah on Monday acknowledged that the clip was misleading and apologised for the \u201cerror of judgement\u201d, but rejected claims that the broadcaster is institutionally biased.<\/p>\n Shah also said the memo did not present \u201ca full picture of the discussions, decisions and actions that were taken\u201d by the standards board in response to concerns raised internally before the leak.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s legal threat is the latest in a flurry of actions he has taken to punish critical media.<\/p>\n Those moves include defamation claims against outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and ABC News, funding cuts at NPR and PBS, and the removal of Associated Press journalists from the White House press pool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n United States President Donald Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn over an edited clip that has plunged the broadcaster into a public relations crisis and prompted the resignations of two top executives. In a letter sent to the BBC, Trump\u2019s legal team has demanded the retraction of \u201cfalse, defamatory, disparaging, misleading, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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