Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has launched an investigation into the BBC for doctoring a video of President Donald Trump's speech on Jan. 6, 2021, for one of its broadcasts, reports Breitbart.
The corporation aired the video during a Panorama program titled "Trump: A Second Chance," which was broadcast a week before the 2024 presidential election.
The spliced-together version made it seem as though Trump said: "We're gonna walk down to the Capitol and I'll be with you, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not gonna have a country anymore."
The BBC apologized for doing so last week but refused Trump's demands for compensation.
Trump said last week he was likely to sue the British broadcaster for up to $5 billion.
Trump's lawyers said the edit caused the president "overwhelming reputational and financial harm," according to a letter seen by Reuters.
They said they would sue in Florida rather than in Britain, where the one-year limit to file a defamation case has expired.
The BBC is likely to argue that the program was not broadcast and was not available on its streaming service in the U.S., so voters in Florida could not have seen it.
The BBC, which is funded by a mandatory levy on TV-watching households, is also widely expected to challenge the reputational-harm claim on grounds that Trump went on to win the election and say the edit was not done in malice.
Carr in a letter sent to executives Wednesday at BBC, NPR and PBS said the program "depicts President Trump voicing a sentence that, in fact, he never uttered. That would appear to meet the very definition of publishing a materially false and damaging statement.”
He included PBS and NPR in the letter because the outlets distribute BBC programming in the U.S.
"The BBC has stated that it has a number of partnerships with U.S. broadcasters, including PBS and NPR, to distribute BBC programming here in America," Carr said.
"I am therefore writing to each of you to determine whether the BBC provided either the video or audio of the spliced speech to NPR, PBS, or any other broadcasters regulated by the FCC for airing in the U.S. If so, please provide the FCC with transcripts and video of any such broadcasts of the relevant program."
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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