I have spent thousands of hours sitting alongside video editors working on productions quite similar to the Panorama documentary that has landed the British Broadcasting Corporation with the threat of a billion-dollar libel suit by Donald Trump. I think I know what happened.
Most people don’t talk in complete sentences unless they are reading a script. They ramble, they backtrack, they take a long time saying something that could be expressed much more quickly – and 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, of the speaker’s hands, of anything that can provide visual material to cover the fact that you have just made a sound edit. Otherwise you will have a jump cut in the video, which nobody likes. So there is an honour system which says that you can edit the shot, but you must not change the meaning
It’s not always a written code. In many places, it’s more of a consensus. Occasionally there will be an argument about whether an edit is legitimate or not, but everybody knows more or less where the line is – and since they are all editing footage against deadlines every day, there is really no time for lengthy debates.
Now we come to the specific edit that caused the problem. It purported to show Donald Trump urging the crowd on January 6, 2021 to attack the Capitol building where Vice-President Mike Pence was scheduled to ratify the election returns and acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.
Trump had already been falsely claiming for almost two months that the election had been “stolen” from him by the Democratic Party. He had already posted on his website that the big protest in Washington DC on January 6 would “be wild”. Thousands of his 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.
Donald Trump is the veteran of a hundred courtroom battles. There are not many days when he doesn’t consult a lawyer about one thing or another. He was hoping to reverse the outcome of the election by force and regain the presidency, but he knew that his plan might not work and he did not want to face charges of treason and rebellion.
So his words were carefully chosen, and probably heavily vetted by his lawyers. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack observed that “President Trump used the phrase ‘peacefully and patriotically’ scripted for him by his White House speech-writers once, about twenty 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 all his supporters) in case it failed.
The Panorama editors working on this part of the documentary were clearly so frustrated by this that they created a clip in which Trump did say the words in the right order, some from 20 minutes in and some from 50 minutes later. That was a brazen, stupid lie.
BBC people 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 that it was a fake. It’s what they thought Trump said, it’s what he meant people to think he was saying, but it is not what he actually said.
Trump threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars, but the biggest defamation payout ever awarded by a British court was about $2 million. US libel awards can go a thousand times higher, but persuading an American court that Donald Trump’s reputation took a severe hit over this would not be easy. Love him or hate him, everybody 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 is currently running Number Two in the United States (just behind the Weather Channel). The whole thing will probably die down in a few weeks.
It is, as Tina Viljoen remarked, “a firestorm in a teapot”.
