BBC Panorama faces billion-dollar libel threat from Trump over edited Jan. 6 clip
By Gwynne Dyer
I’ve spent thousands of hours sitting alongside video editors working on productions similar to the BBC’s Panorama documentary that has drawn a billion-dollar libel threat from Donald Trump. I think I know what happened.
Most people don’t talk in complete sentences unless they’re reading a script. They ramble, backtrack, and take a long time saying something that could be expressed more quickly. Part of the editor’s job is to clean it up: keep it short, clear and to the point.
That’s why you always need “cutaways”: shots of the crowd, the speaker’s hands, or anything that can cover a sound edit. Otherwise, the video will have a jump cut, which nobody likes. There’s an honour system: you can edit the shot, but you mustn’t change the meaning.
It’s not always a written code. In many places, it’s more of a consensus. Occasionally there’ll be an argument about whether an edit is legitimate, but editors know where the line is—and with deadlines looming, there’s little time for debate.
Now we come to the specific edit that caused the problem. It purported to show Trump urging the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, to attack the Capitol, where Vice-President Mike Pence was scheduled to ratify the election returns and acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.
Trump had been falsely claiming for almost two months that the election had been “stolen” from him by the Democratic Party. He’d posted on his website that the big protest in Washington would “be wild.” Thousands of extreme supporters—Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and the like—were already in the city.
So one or more of the Panorama editors “remembered” that Trump told the mob to attack the Capitol. He must have. Even three and a half years later, they were sure they saw him saying that on that morning. But when they looked for it on screen, it wasn’t there. His wishes were clear, but he never said all the words together in quite the right order.
Trump is the veteran of a hundred courtroom battles. There aren’t many days when he doesn’t consult a lawyer about one thing or another. He was hoping to reverse the election outcome by force, but he knew his plan might not work and he didn’t want to face charges of treason and rebellion.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 attack observed that “President Trump used the phrase ‘peacefully and patriotically,’ scripted for him by his White House speechwriters, once, about 20 minutes into his speech. Then he spent the next 50-or-so minutes amping up his crowd with lies about the election, attacking his own vice-president and Republican members of Congress, and exhorting the crowd to fight.” It was a call for an insurrection, but with deniability for Trump, although not necessarily for his supporters.
The Panorama editors working on this part of the documentary were clearly frustrated. They created a clip in which Trump did say the words in the right order—some from 20 minutes in, some from 50 minutes later. That was a brazen, stupid lie.
BBC staff from outside the Panorama team would have seen the finished product before broadcast, but if nobody warned them about the clip, they probably didn’t notice it was fake. It’s what they thought Trump said, what they believed he meant, but it’s not what he actually said.
Trump says he will sue the BBC for a billion dollars, but the biggest defamation payout ever awarded by a British court was about $2 million. United States libel awards can go much higher, but persuading an American court that Trump’s reputation suffered a severe hit would be difficult. Love him or hate him, the public already knows what he’s like.
The BBC’s status as the English-speaking world’s “most trusted source of information” will probably survive, although it’s currently No. 2 in the U.S., just behind the Weather Channel. The controversy will likely die down in a few weeks. As Tina Viljoen remarked, it’s “a firestorm in a teapot.”