FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has reportedly written to the BBC, PBS and NPR announcing an investigation into whether a controversial BBC documentary with misleading editing of Donald Trump’s speech was ever broadcast in the US.
breitbart Received a copy of the letter, which has not been shared publicly by Carr or the FCC. It is addressed to NPR CEO Catherine Maher, PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger and Tim Davie, who was director general of the BBC until he announced his resignation last week.
In it, Carr asks whether the BBC has provided “video or audio of the divided speech” to NPR or PBS, and requests transcripts and video of any possible broadcast of the program in the US.
The investigation was launched by the BBC in 2024. panorama The documentary featured footage of Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, but the two segments, about an hour apart, were edited together to present a single statement that suggested Trump had explicitly called for violence at the Capitol.
Trump appeared to say, “We’ll head to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you.” “And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country.” The footage was actually composed of material from three separate segments of the speech, with a mention of the fight occurring 54 minutes later during a segment on “corrupt” elections.
This documentary has created an uproar in Britain. This edit was brought to light this month when Wire A leaked internal BBC memo written by former editorial adviser Michael Prescott, a former political editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned company, was publicized. sunday timesIt sparked a national debate about the BBC’s alleged bias, leading to the resignation of both Davy and former head of news Deborah Turness, and prompting Trump himself to threaten to sue the broadcaster,
This is not the first time Carr has threatened PBS and NPR, but it comes after several censorship actions from the FCC. In September Carr threatened the broadcast licenses of stations carrying Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, leading to Kimmel being temporarily shut down. Over the summer his FCC established an ombudsman at CBS to monitor “bias” as a condition of approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger, and Carr recently reposted Trump’s call to fire Seth Meyers over jokes directed at the president. This week, Trump threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcast license when a reporter asked him about the Epstein files, and suggested Carr “should look at that.”