Kathrine Frich
The legal fight dates all the way back to December.
Cutting a few seconds of video usually stays an issue for the editing room floor.
In television news, producers trim long speeches every single day to fit tight broadcast schedules.
Sometimes, though, a single splice triggers a massive trans-Atlantic courtroom battle.
Green light in Florida
On Tuesday, US District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz ruled that President Donald Trump can move forward with his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, according to Reuters and HuffPost.
While the Florida judge dismissed a separate claim over unfair trade practices, he kept the core defamation case alive.
Kuntz found that the president made a plausible argument that the British public broadcaster harmed his reputation and knew, or should have known, its video edit was misleading. Still, the judge did not rule on whether Trump has actually proven his case yet.
Following the decision, Trump celebrated what he called a “huge victory” on social media. “We will continue fighting against, and defeating, all of those who try to deceive the American People!” he wrote.
Spliced January 6 footage
The legal fight dates back to December, when Trump sued the British network in a Florida federal court. According to Reuters, the lawsuit targets an episode of the BBC documentary show “Panorama” that aired just before Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
In that broadcast, editors stitched together separate moments from Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021. The cut linked his call for supporters to march to the US Capitol with a line where he urged the crowd to “fight like hell”. It left out the part where he told the crowd to protest peacefully, making it look as if he ordered the Capitol riot.
Fallout inside the network was swift. After a leaked internal BBC memo pointed to the footage as proof of possible political bias, the broadcaster faced a major public relations crisis and top executives resigned.
Although the BBC already apologized to Trump and admitted the edits were misleading, the network insists it did not commit defamation. A BBC spokesperson told Reuters the broadcaster was surprised by Tuesday’s ruling, but respects the court and remains confident in its defense.
