BBC chairman Samir Shah has apologised for a Panorama documentary which edited clip of a speech by US President Donald Trump, calling it an “error of judgement”.

“We accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action,” Shah said in a letter to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Both the BBC’s director general and head of news resigned on Sunday following criticism that the programme gave the impression Trump explicitly encouraged the Capital Hill riot in January 2021 by placing two different parts of the speech together.

The edit was raised in a leaked internal BBC memo published by the Telegraph newspaper last Monday.

Shah said the BBC had received more than 500 complaints since the publication of the memo written by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee.

He said the edit had been discussed by the committee in January 2025 and in May 2025 as part of a wider review of the BBC’s US election coverage.

It was not pursued further “given it had not attracted significant audience feedback and had been transmitted before the US election”.