Trump thinks BBC used AI against him: “They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with January 6th”
The US President filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the British broadcaster on Monday night for selectively editing his January 6, 2021 speech.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Great Britain’s public-service broadcaster the BBC. The lawsuit, which was filed in a federal court in Miami, is seeking $5 billion in damages for defamation, and another $5 billion for violating trade practices.
The President is bringing the BBC to account for deliberate and selective editing of quotes made during his infamous speech from the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 which appeared in Matthew Hill’s documentary for Panorama, ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’. The program aired in the UK on October 28, 2024, one week before the US presidential elections.
BBC editors went to astonishing lengths to cut and paste sections of Trump’s speech, changing what was actually said to construct a completely different and belligerent narrative.
What Trump said
In the raw, uncut footage, Trump told those congregated in Washington DC at 12:12 p.m: “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women - and we’re probably not gonna be cheering so much for some of them”. The bold text was cut and spliced into the BBC Panorama edit.
The BBC edit, took two pieces of the first part of this section of the speech, cut Trump off mid-sentence then added another unrelated piece of dialogue from later in his speech, at 1:07 p.m, overlaying the parts where the three different sections had been spliced together with a shot of the stage so that no one would notice the edits.
How the BBC edited Trump’s speech
This was how the edited speech was broadcast in the Panorama documentary in October 2024: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol (edit). And I’ll be there with you (edit). And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have country anymore".
Here is the unedited, second part, with Trump speaking 55 minutes later at 1:07 p.m with the edits the BBC made highlighted in bold: “But I said something’s wrong here, something is really wrong, can’t have happened. And we fight, we fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have country anymore”.
AI or intentional?
Television production involves a lot of continuity trickery, editing, and overlaying. The full transcript of Trump’s January 2024 rally speech was, and still is, in the public domain, so it is incredibly brazen for a broadcaster like the BBC to deliberately doctor and change a speech to construct a false narrative - believing that no one would notice.
It is also highly improbable or almost impossible that such an conscious editing decision wouldn’t have been noticed and flagged at the editing or post-production stage.
On Monday’s address at the Oval Office, Trump casually suggested that it could have been down to AI... While there are many AI-generated videos of Trump out there, let’s be realistic, Panorama is the longest-running television current affairs magazine in the world - it is meticulously researched, planned, scripted, filmed and edited - not thrown together with AI.
Here’s what Trump had to say earlier this week: “In a little while you’ll see I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth, literally. They had me saying things that I never said, coming out, I guess they used AI or something... So we’ll be bringing that lawsuit. Even the media can’t believe that one. They actually put terrible words in my mouth, having to do with January 6, that I didn’t say. They actually had me speaking with words I never said, and they got caught. Because I believe somebody at the BBC said, this is so bad, it has to be reported. That’s called fake news”.
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