Summary of complaint
While this programme is over a year old and consequently no longer available to watch on Â鶹Éç iPlayer, we have received new complaints which followed media reports about the inclusion of footage from Donald Trump's 6th January 2021 speech and criticism of how this was edited.
Our response
We have reviewed this documentary, in particular the editing of Donald Trump’s speech, in the light of these new complaints.
The programme followed some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters before the 2024 US election, and included a sequence about a speech made by President Trump on January 6 2021. During the sequence, we showed excerpts taken from two different parts of the speech.
We accept our edit created the impression we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from two different points in the speech.
Directly after those excerpts, we showed a clip of a group of ‘Proud Boys’ marching to the Capitol. Although many people did march to the Capitol following his speech, the clip of this particular group had been filmed before Donald Trump began his speech.
Consequently, this gave the impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action. The Â鶹Éç would like to apologise for that error of judgement.
Â鶹Éç News have said there was no intention to mislead. Rather, the intention of this sequence was to convey the key messages of the speech in a condensed format, since the whole speech was over an hour long, and also to illustrate what was happening on the day.
It has been suggested that we removed the word ‘peacefully’ from our clips of the speech. To be clear, we did not do so.