Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr sent a letter to officials with the BBC, NPR, and PBS, announcing that the agency has launched an investigation into the BBC’s edits of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.
“As you know, the BBC was recently caught intentionally distorting a speech that President Trump gave in January of 2021,” the letter, obtained by Breitbart, reads. “It did so by splicing together one portion of the speech with an entirely separate portion of the speech that came 54 minutes later. In doing so, the BBC program depicts President Trump voicing a sentence that, in fact, he never uttered.”
Carr said the action “would appear to meet the very definition of publishing a materially false and damaging statement.”
Addressing the other broadcasters in the letter, Carr urged that PBS and BPR “determine whether the BBC provided either the video or audio of the spliced speech to NPR, PBS, or any other broadcaster regulated by the FCC for airing in the U.S.”
The BBC asserts that it did not distribute the edited content to US channels.
BBC Chair Samir Shah asserted that the network will fight President Trump’s moves to take legal action against it. An internal email from Shah, obtained by Sky News, asserted that the BBC’s “position has not changed. There is no basis for a defamation case and we are determined to fight this.”
Shah wrote, “There is a lot being written, said and speculated upon about the possibility of legal action, including potential costs or settlements, adding, “In all this we are, of course, acutely aware of the privilege of our funding and the need to protect our licence fee payers, the British public.”
