The Big Double Standard
And Now The News...
Some of you may be bothered by the fact that NBC News lied and is now lying about its lies in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case. As Breitbart.com reported while all the mainstream outlets except the Washington Post looked the other way, NBC News edited a tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call to make Zimmerman sound like a racist. A full description of the scurrilous edit is at the link.
When they were caught in their dishonesty, NBC News temporized. When they could no longer temporize, they scapegoated a single unnamed producer, firing him late on the Friday before Easter/Passover weekend so no one would notice. Then NBC News President Steve Capus released a statement to Reuters saying the deliberate editing of the tape to misrepresent the phone call was “a mistake and not a deliberate act to misrepresent the phone call.”
Some of you may read that statement and say to yourself, “Golly, Klavan on the Culture! How can Mr. Capus keep the word News in his title and not curl up in a ball of shame while tearing at his own flesh with his fingernails and begging God to forgive him for having sunk to depths of disingenuousness unimaginable to any real news person?” And some others of you may scratch your heads and wonder, “Gee! How come Andrew Breitbart was accused of dishonesty and racism when he posted edited videos of Shirley Sherrod, even though he attached a post explaining the edited context?” After which, you might add, “Crikey! Didn’t Breitbart respond to the accusations by making every piece of material in the Sherrod case readily available online?” And you might go on to remark, “Holy Moly, whatever a Moly is! Isn’t it kind of unfair that when NBC News actually has been dishonest and racist — and when they’ve responded to being caught in their dishonest racism by being even more dishonest — the news media doesn’t accuse them of anything at all but merely puts their collective fingers in their collective ears and whistles Dixie?”
Yep. That about sums it up.
I think that hypocrisy is a currency that the left and right are flush with. If I paid attention anymore to the double speak I’d been in traction from the whiplash.
I’m glad more and more people are waking up to it…and becoming independent because of it.
Ah yes. Equivalency with no concrete examples. The dwelling hole of the morally superior and intellectually lazy.
You mean, the “morally flippant?”
TRANSLATION:
Find yourself a good primer on logic and look up the “tu quoque” fallacy.
Trouble with that one is, The Leftoids are constantly accusing us of stuff they are in the process of doing just so they can pull that one out when we call them on what they are doing. Never mind the initial accusations are lies.
We only did it that one time because we know that is what you do all the time.
Clearly the preponderance of hypocrisy is on the Left. But let’s not forget our own family-values advocates who have wide stances or hike the Appalachian trail.
Lots of equivalency arguments being floated. Yours is another sinker: both Craig & Sanford received the full spectrum of opprobrium from every Conservative news source, the blogs and the Conservative commentariat. Don’t deny this. Calls for resignation/replacement were loudest from the right. Those two reprobates had no support, none, from Conservatives.
Now, contrast that to the democratz who circle the wagons and then re-elect and otherwise continue to support their hairbags, perverts and criminals. No equivalency at all.
Pay better attention.
Vim Toot!
Spot on! Conservatives will eat there own, for example, Evangelicals, and Santormumists, will not vote for Romney because he is a Mormon and not conservative enough. Meanwhile, the Progressives and leftists will stick together, along with a large group of ignorant women, and blacks and get Obama reelected.
While attending NYU Law School of Law, I interned at NBC during the summer of 1980 so there was a lot of political coverage and my job was to retrieve video cassettes from the video archives room (taking good care not to touch the cassettes too much since this was verboten in NBC’s Union territory) and deliver them to producers who sat around all afternoon MAKING STORIES for the evening news. They spliced together little bits of footage from various videos and the result was simply magical–creating news right before my very eyes. Eventually I became a lawyer at a large book publishing company and my job there was to review manuscripts and grill the authors to the nines making sure we had every conceivable source for anything potentially libelous or invasive of someone’s privacy. Had I been presented the 911 tape and listened to it and then was asked if we could publish what NBC aired, I would have jumped out of my chair and run to the president of the company and insisted that the entire tape had to be presented to give it fair context for whatever commentary the author wanted to make about it. If Zimmerman ever lives to see the inside of a courtroom, he should bring an action against NBC because it’s actionable on its face.
Thanks for sharing these great insights.
I wonder, if the person doing the editing, didn’t actually hear it the way he released it. He’s a liberal – like most other people in the media – so he doesn’t have all that many working brain cells. George Zimmerman is supposed to be a racist, I wouldn’t doubt that the editor heard what he expected to hear, and not what was actually there. I believe that liberals often hear what they expect to hear, and not what was actually said.
And after the ersatz “intellectual” dust settles, you shout out in unison:
I don’t know!
Third Base!!
That reasoning reminds me of Preacher Pauly’s sermon in Vampire in Brooklyn.
You’ve got a monkey’s image up!
Obviously, you are dog whistling in code, you racist!
Chimps are not monkeys. They are apes.
I doubt lefties whistle “Dixie” to drown out unpleasant reality. Perhaps the “Internationale”?
Well they might. The KKK was established by the Democrats.
Lets not forget that the three biggest mass murderers in world history, Moa, Stalin and Hitler , were all left wingers too.
Lenin justified what he did, because it was to make a “better society.” Too far of a comparison? maybe but only because of degrees, not of kind.
No, not a matter of degree, but a matter of time, a matter of what they can get away with, yet.
Agreed. Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t start out being Stalin, Mao and Hitler. If the left succeed in gaining control of everything (they are very close now) and keep control they will start killing the stubborn (conservatives/Christians/constitutionalists) out of exasperation to usher in their utopia.
As a person who has worked the better part of his life in print, radio and television news, I can tell you that only teachers are more politically correct, and that rectitude and consequent smugness is part of a newsroom’s DNA, especially for management. No news outlet in Los Angeles is allowed to mention race, even when describing someone sought in a case. The exception is white on black or brown violence, or to a lesser extent brown on black violence. As for NBC and its standards, I once produced a segment that was borderline risque for the day, with lots of shapely young female legs on display. I was told to take it the standards office for approval. The guy making the decision on what could or could not be shown was blind. He kept his seeing-eye dog with him. I guess if the dog yipped the clip was a no-no.
It it wasn’t for double standards, the left would have no standards at all.
“The end justifies the means.” Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Rachel Carson,
Eugenicists at Planned Parenthood, MSM, Obama.
Nope. The means are irrelevant & justification is unnecessary. The end is the only thing that matters.
“Fake but accurate” – CBS fake National Guard memos, 2004
“The narrative was right but the facts were wrong.” – Duke Lacrosse “rape” case
“Errors were made.” – NBC News, 2012
Yeap, the Press is continuing it’s slide into irrelevance.
Why mock Fish? Is he wrong? You clearly don’t read him regularly. No doubt he would say that members of the news media also “elevate tribal obligations over the universal obligations.”
I agree – why mock fish?
After dumping their very disagreeable snack on the editors carpet – the bad people commenced to destroy the newspapers ability to publish ever again – thus ending yet another source of ‘lies from the good people’
With so much more bad to perform – next time – why not mock turtle!
Oh, well played! Bravo (clapping enthusiastically)! Lewis Carroll is smiling!
It’s really just professional wrestling in neckties, isn’t it? A shabby morality play where the Bad Guy might win a battle or two, but in the end the script calls for the Good Guy to prevail.
But it isn’t. The people who stoop to bad methods have bad ends. The people who demand good methods have good ends.
There is no redeeming quality of the left. They lie, in order to steal. They steal in order to enslave. They enslave in order to torture. They torture in order to murder.
Stalin, that great icon of the left, in addition to murdering millions, began as a bank robber. At one point Trotsky was opposed to bank robbery, and convinced others, so Stalin left the Communist party over it.
Stalin, that great icon of the left, in addition to murdering millions, began as a bank robber. At one point Trotsky was opposed to bank robbery, and convinced others, so Stalin left the Communist party over it.
According to every book I’ve ever read on the subject – and I have two or three shelves full of books covering the history of the Soviet Union – Stalin was an organizer of bank robberies in his early days in the Communist Party but never participated in one.
I have never come across anything where Trotsky spoke out for or against bank robberies as a means of funding the Bolshevik effort. That does not mean it never happened but let’s just say I’m skeptical. Even if Trotsky did express reservations about bank robberies – although the official term was “Revolutionary Expropriations” – it isn’t necessarily significant. Trotsky only became a Bolshevik in the summer of 1917, a few months before Lenin’s coup overthrew the genuine Russian Revolution of February 1917 that had ended Tsardom and brought in the Provisional Government. Trotsky had been a Menshevik, a more moderate socialist group than the Bolsheviks until Lenin finally persuaded him to join the Bolsheviks.
As for Stalin leaving the Communist Party, this is the first I’ve heard of such a thing. That would have been a HUGE event in Soviet political history so I would have expected to have heard of such an event if it took place. As far as I know, Stalin never once left the Communist Party prior to his death in 1953.
THAT is one of the all time great lines EVER!
It deserves to be much-repeated, and often thrown in the face of the leftists.
I believe a ‘Moly’ is a fastner that allows you to hang something on flimsy wallboard.
I work in consruction and you are thinking of a “molly”.
This all reminds me of a photographer guy photoshopped a war-time picture in an attempt to make the image more smoky & scarier. I don’t remember what all came of that other than he was fired & the images were denounced.
“How can Mr. Capus keep the word News in his title and not curl up in a ball of shame while tearing at his own flesh with his fingernails and begging God to forgive him for having sunk to depths of disingenuousness unimaginable to any real news person?”
Because he works at NBC, that’s why. What did you expect from the main stream media? This is going to be the Duke Lacross case all over again.
NBC News moto -
I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you think you heard is not what I meant.
You guys are way off the mark here. You’re giving these people too much credit. There is no nefarious conspiracy to tilt the news. They heard the full tape. They “realized” that Zimmerman was out there looking for a black kid. He basically admitted this when he responded to the 911 operators query that the guy “looked black”. As far as these journalist were concerned the edit reflected the reality of what happened.
These people are very simple automaton. They are taught how to think and behave at J school (I’m using ‘think’ in the broadest possible manner here.)
I have this image of a bunch of people looking very confused when this issue was brought up. I’m sure they had to go looking for someone outside the newsroom to explain it to them.
Thank God (or Al Gore) for the internet.
Even a conservative gets it wrong. The Sherrod tapes WERE NOT EDITED. They may not have been shown in their entirety but that is far cry from what NBC did.
You’re right but I’ll go further and I posted several comments at Breitbart’s Big sites to this effect at the time everyone was falsely accusing Andrew Breitbart of editing the tape with Sherrod. Andrew Breitbart’s FIRST and ORIGINAL narrative about the Shirley Sherrod speech to the NAACP stated outright that “EVENTUALLY” Sherrod’s “HUMANITY” took over and she had helped the white farmer. THIS was absolutely sufficient contextual commentary by Breitbart that made it clear he was summarizing other comments she had made that put her in a more positive non-racist-against-whites light. Her lawsuit is a big nuisance to the Breitbart organization but it’s an absolute loser. And she has much to lose as a plaintiff claiming alleged damage to her reputation.
To give NBC the benefit of the doubt, it’s possible that the misleading editing was indeed unintentional. The editor might have been stretching and inadvertently hit the wrong button. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Mary_Woods
What did Dan Rather say, the documents were forged but the story was true. This is the same thinking.
“Mainstream”?
Unless this “stream” is attached to an enema bag, which would explain its output, it is hardly reflective of any “main stream” to which a sane American would wish to identify. And then, only to relieve a serious condition of blockage.
NBC, the Costa Concordia of network news, tripped and fell into its own lifeboat this weekend, when it explained to Reuters (itself a paragon of integrity, just ask any Israeli), that it was “unintentional, inadvertent and wholly innocent” in …oops, leaving out the key and defining words of the dispatcher, in the Martin/Zimmerman altercation.
The unidentified flying obfuscator has now been “fired”…and we know this and believe this, because the people currently lying about the “editing” being “unintentionally complete BS”, are telling us so, and we all know that the THIRD layer of lies, is where we should begin to blindly accept their word.
This act of non-contrition, telling the worldwide liars (Reuters) that the national liars (NBC) should filter down to the local liars (affiliates), the Costa Concordia, “we tripped and fell into our lifeboat” cover story…is how the left handles the “unexpected, unintended consequences” of what we out here in Bitter Clingerland know as “getting caught”.
As for “double standards”, that is a misnomer. We have standards. They have propaganda and lies. And when a dirty maherfaher calls Sarah Palin a c..t, he means it. When Sgt. Schultz fees his face with another Krispy Kreme and shouts sputtering epithets and slurs against women and then says “I know NUTHINK!”, HE MEANS IT.
They have no standards because propaganda and lies are the mission. And the missionary zeal in foisting those lies and that propaganda upon us is its own reward.
But, they are NOT the “mainstream”. Unless you want to be force fed from an enema bag.
Mr.cfbleachers,
Spectacular, superb, not a lie unexposed. I’d like to see you appointed dept. head of journalism in an ivy league school, detect the lie-tellers, retire them, and replace with truth-seekers and truth-tellers. Imagine if our future journalists dealt in facts, not mythology. No
Mr. Klavan — I note that the Obama Re-election campaign is advertising on here, on this page, next to your article. They are also advertising today on Breitbart.com, on the page that details the faux Eric Holder vote. What will be next — will Obama advertise on Rush Limbaugh during his feminazi segments?
Works for me. Suck money out of the Obama machine and put it in the pockets of his enemies.
Yeah, that works for me. I’m really not worried that those ads will “convert” any conservatives.
Better yet CNN Susan Candiotti is able to verbalize the F word and the N word with impunity, because she is just repeating someone or reading something someone wrote.
FOUR LEGS GOOD; TWO LEGS BETTER… Or, alternately, Freedom is Slavery; Servitude is Freedom… The only thing Orwell got wrong was the year.
“Stanley Fish wrote an article for the New York Times.”
Kind of gives the term “fishwrap of record” a whole new perspective.
mo·ly
1 [moh-lee] Show IPA
noun, plural -lies. Classical Mythology .
an herb given to Odysseus by Hermes to counteract the spells of Circe.
Please remember:
Steve Capus was also the President of NBC News when they were found to have SELECTIVELY EDITED Richard Engel’s interview with President GWB.
A pattern of… something.
I’d say “let’s go to the videotape,” but we know how unreliable those can be. Instead, let’s go to the White House archives:
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080519-4.html
I like to remind people of Spiro Agnew’s speech about the media in November 1969. It was supposed to be shocking and terribly offensive to the media elite. But today it seems quite mild mannered.
”In the networks’ endless pursuit of controversy, we should ask: What is the end value — to enlighten or to profit? What is the end result — to inform or to confuse?”
Yellow journalism isn’t new. William Randolph Hearst destroyed Fatty Arbuckle in 1921 because of his sensationalism. Hearst boasted that he sold more papers regarding the Arbuckle case (Arbuckle was finally found innocent – not “not guilty” but innocent) than when the Lusitania sank.
I’ve said this until I’m blue in the face but the fact is that this country CAN NOT SURVIVE with the blatant misinformation and omission of information practiced daily by the institutions that are tasked with providing that information to the people. A self-governing country cannot survive when the information it needs to make informed decisions about its self governance is so blatantly twisted and distorted. This malfeasance goes way beyond dishonesty or laziness or ‘trying to create a better world’. This is grounds for revolt. These people deserve to marched to the coast and forcibly thrown off the continent. Tar and feathers my ass.
Yes MM (quite well named as malevolent), it’s all the same, isn’t it? You’re probably one of those people who enjoys your own cleverness in calling Fox “Faux” News, yet you see nothing extraordinary here. Well, a mainstream “news” organization (which still carries a tremendous amount of “fourth estate” power) purposefully slandered an individual, for no apparent reason other than to frame a particular narrative. Given the fact that this narrative inflamed racial animosity and tension, and led to very real concerns about violence being done to some people (including an innocent elderly couple who happened to get their address tweeted by reprobate “celebrities”), I would say that NBC has quite a lot to answer for, and I’m not in the least willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, or engage in your milquetoast “left and right hypocrisy” cop-out.
SG, your comment leads to another interesting question. Given that virtually nothing gets done at the corporate level these days without is being run by an attorney, how likely is it that the corporate attorney(s) for NBC were (at the very least) made aware of this tape prior to its airing? If one/some/all of them approved it, would a serious ethics violation (and subsequent disciplinary action) be in the offing? Or, alternatively, if corporate ran with it DESPITE advice from counsel, that would be extremely relevant as well. Of course, when they get sued, they’ll claim privilege, but I would still love to be in on te discovery.
Given the notoriety and newsworthiness the Zimmerman/Martin matter had already received, there isn’t a doubt in my mind that that piece was reviewed by layers of people higher than the unnamed allegedly fired producer, including a legal layer. What the lawyer communicated is privileged but the fact that an email or conversation took place is not. In other words an honest discovery process would list the communication but not disclose rge actual communication and claim a privilege. When there are this many cooks in the broth someone is bound to be disgruntled and stuff will leak out. Stay tuned for eventual fireworks.
The Sophistical vs the Socratic.
They’re definitely not goodness and maybe not evil.
After four generations of incessant indoctrination, it isn’t fair to say they are anything but what they are: idealogues so committed that it’s now a part of their dna.
They can’t even conceive of another way.
They have to be removed. It’s the only solution.
Mainstream media – “Merchants of chaos”
All that greatness, Mr. Klavan, but failing to finally explain what a “Moly” is leaves me hollow and empty inside. Hmmm, think I’ll go apply for a job across the street at NBC – LA.
We are supposed to forgive NBC for lying and telling us Zimmerman is a racist because he is a very bad man.
And how do we know he is a very bad man?
NBC told us!
What does it tell you about Democrats when they have to lie about their intentions? Would anyone have voted for Barack if he told them he was going to spend them into oblivion? You see in spite of Barack’s railing against millionaires and billionaires, there are not enough of them to make a dent in the revenue side. The only place they get that kind of money to pay for all this spending is the middle class. So while they will swear on Grandma’s Bible that they are the party of the middle class, they will proceed to tax you into poverty.
And if they can make you buy health insurance, what prevents them from making you ride the bus, buy a Volt, or eat brocolli? Nudge, becomes push, then it becomes force when you won’t comply. And if they have your bank account number to get your healthcare premiums, what prevents them from wiping out your bank accounts? Really nothing other than personal morality. The constitution won’t protect you and your money would be long gone before you could get through the courts.
In better news…(pun intended)
a friend watches CBS news,
Sat in a few times and have to say they have improved.
They appear to be trying.
On NBC, I agree they are flat out lying.
I have many years audio editing, back to tape.
I honestly cannot think of a way, in any software, using any system,
to “accidentally” have this happen.
There is no room for reasonable doubt.
This is extremely serious, very bad news.
Please keep the heat on.
WHY>????????????????????????????
Andrew Klavan, as usual you hit the nail on the metaphorical head. Thanks.
The NBC tape is a symbol of the lies and distortions that have been bruited about concerning white Americans during this Martin dust up by the liberal Left and especially by black Americans. From the NBA players association, to Magic Johnson, to President Obama, to the black press, the Daily Kos, Bill Mahrer, etc., the degree to which heads have nodded agreement about spurious racial myths has been nothing less than astounding. If you’re in the right camp you get on CNN, the wrong camp invites firings, although the philosophical and intellectual space is the same.
Lies? Mainstream media? Synonymous!
“Holy Moly” is Allium moly, an onion relative with cute yellow flowers, often sold as a companion for blue-flowered spring bulbs. It was apparently used by witches in their spells in the olden days. There might be a Shakespeare reference to it somewhere.
Mr. Klavan, I believe you left out the most important part of Stanley Fish’s column — the last paragraph, partic. the last 2 sentences:
** “I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule ‘don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you’ the rule ‘be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.’ It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.” **
This terrifies and horrifies me. After yrs. of telling us that fighting is baaaad, now the left tells us that might does indeed make right — that is, as long as the “might” and “right” are on THEIR side. They owe NOTHING to their own ideology, namely accepting and incorporating the “differential & discriminatory” into their language, b/c they are always i.e. correct (um, I guess *not* “right” — that has so MANY meanings these days, hmm?)
The Lame Stream EneMedia does not exist to ‘inform’ it exists to ‘propagandize’ and to feed a naive , gullible, ‘Stupid’ American electorate a diet of ‘”Celebrity’ MUSH. It is also there to ‘run interference’ for Obama and the Left Wing moonbats, to bury any bad news and stifle any investigation in to the ‘Chosen One’ the USURPER , the man with no DOCUMENTED History, who was voted in to office by the people with no brains.
Can we just start calling it the “Democrat Media”? The party of slavery, segregation and abortion brings you unethical “reporting” too.
Democrat Media…
Living with a traumatized and having the ability to help a victim something worth getting out of bed image up
As for NBC sacking an unnamed producer made me think of ‘..The Holy Grail’ opening.
“We apologize for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked”.
“We apologize again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking of people who have just been sacked have been sacked”.
“The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it ti be known that they have just been sacked”.
NBC.. what an ideological train wreck in lucidness and reason.
Real issue here is the left’s continued success with proof by example.
This dovetails nicely with the Washington Post’s “True but False” fact check about job losses for women during Obama’s Presidency.
So, that they’re the ‘good guys’ is the reason that black college students who demand (and get) segregated dormitories and other student housing wherein only black students may live are not considered as racists, while people who advocate avoiding crowds of black people are racists?? I suppose so. “Oh, brave new word, that has such people in it.”
“Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice,” Stanley Fish and his mighty mind explained. “Rush Limbaugh is the bad guy.. ”
Oh come on. This is just showing off on the part of Fish. He’s tweaking the nose of conservatives because he knows he can get away with it – and unfortunately, he’s right. This is the part of the movie when the bully teases the sports team full of losers and bozos named “The Conservatives”. I’m just hoping the rest of the movie scenario plays out in November.