A miscorrected misquote: Michael Prescott and the BBC Panorama incident

It's a major news story at the moment: the BBC is under threat as US President Donald Trump says he plans to sue the corporation for $1bn. The accusation is that the BBC misrepresented the president's words in a speech which he gave prior to the 6th of January US Capitol riot.

An incorrect correction

Though Panorama (the BBC One investigative documentary series at the heart of the scandal) did indeed edit together clips from Trump's speech, the claim that the speech's overall theme was falsified is questionable.

In the documentary, the US president appears to say the following:

"We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell."

According to the White House, the edit (which joins together two separate parts of the speech into one) was misleading and made it appear as though Trump had incited the riots.

Many different versions of the original speech have been circulated

The correction offered by Michael Prescott, the man whose memo launched this scandal into the public sphere, reads as follows:

"Fifteen minutes into the speech, what Trump actually said: 'We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I'll be with you. I know that  everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to  peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.' It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it."

Except this version of events is also incorrect. According to the transcripts of the speech, Donald Trump's actual words were:

"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 going to be cheering so much for some of them.

"Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that  Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.

"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the  Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

An attack on the BBC

In a column published in The New World magazine, former strategist and spokesman for Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, describes the event as "the same playbook we've seen from the MAGA movement, from Murdoch's media empire, from the Mail, for whom BBC bashing has been a decades-long obsession".

He goes on to say that: "The BBC is imperfect and I haven't always agreed with its output. How could anyone when its output is so vast?"

Lawyers at the BBC, in response to Donald Trump, have said that: "While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was  edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim."