AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The BBC is apologizing to President Trump over a misleadingly edited documentary that aired in 2024. The documentary spliced together parts of the speech Trump made on January 6, 2021. The president has threatened to sue the British broadcaster for $1 billion unless it retracts the documentary. The BBC refuses to pay any compensation and says it did not defame the president.
In light of this story, we wanted to talk about how we handle editing the president's remarks here at NPR. And to do that, we've brought in Tony Cavin, NPR's managing editor for standards and practices. Hi, Tony.
TONY CAVIN, BYLINE: Hi there, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so what is the rule here at NPR when it comes to how we approach remarks by the president of the United States, whether it's podcast or radio?
CAVIN: There are really two rules. There's the big rule, and that is that when you edit anything on audio, you can really manipulate it. You can change it all around. So the big rule is to make sure that we don't change the meaning of what the person we are editing says. We have to stay true to that.
CHANG: Right.
CAVIN: With the president, there's a special rule - and it applies to the vice president and major party candidates as well - and that is that we don't do internal edits. We won't click out an um or a ah or take out something from the middle of a sentence, even if doing that makes it easier for the audience to understand.
CHANG: And we're talking about not even shortening a pause, correct?
CAVIN: Not on the president or the vice president. If you were interviewing me, as you're doing now, you could certainly clean it up and make me sound a little bit cleaner than I sound.
CHANG: (Laughter).
CAVIN: But with the president, the vice president and major party candidates, you're adding something editorially if you clean up those pauses and stuff. It's important to know. And I think we show a lot of caution even with other people in terms of internal edits, precisely because we want things to be clear and concise. We want the listener to understand what's going on. But if you make someone sound too coherent when they're not that coherent, you...
CHANG: Yeah.
CAVIN: ...May be changing the tone of what they're actually saying.
CHANG: OK. Well, I'm listening to this rationale. If we care about total accuracy, if we care about making sure that nothing is taken out of context or mischaracterized in any way, why don't we apply this rule to other important public officials beyond the president of the United States and vice president and major party candidates? Why not to foreign leaders?
CAVIN: Well, first of all because the president and the vice president are so widely quoted that people may be aware of what they said, and they will think we're trying to put a thumb on the scale. The second reason is because those people have a special place in our news reports. If President Trump says something about a particular good or service, that can move markets, whereas if you or I say it, it probably won't make much of a difference. So everything that a president or a vice president or even a major party candidate says has a lot more weight in the United States than something said by anyone else.
CHANG: There's just a lot more at stake is what you're saying.
CAVIN: Exactly. And we want to make sure that we can't be seen as trying to steer the conversation one way or the other.
CHANG: And to your knowledge, how common of a rule is this among major media organizations in the U.S.? - this rule against internal edits of the president of the United States.
CAVIN: I think it's very common. I think it's what most electronic media do. Although in this day and age, because everyone does audio and video, there may be places where they're newer and they haven't thought this through yet. And I will say, for the record, that this is one of the problems the BBC is having. They admit that that was a misleading edit, and it didn't meet their standards, which is why they apologized.
CHANG: Tony Cavin is NPR's managing editor for standards and practices. Thank you so much, Tony.
CAVIN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
