NBC’s Edit-Gate Worse Than CBS’ Rathergate
A day before NBC fired a still-unnamed producer for deliberately editing an audio tape to make Florida’s George Zimmerman sound racist, John Nolte of Big Hollywood wrote that this was a worse moment for TV news than Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ debacle in September of 2004 — and he’s right:
The Peacock Network didn’t “misinterpret” what was in front of them and they didn’t jump the gun. What NBC did was ALTER what they had to make Zimmerman look racist.
On the storied ”Today Show,” NBC News told America Zimmerman said this on the 911 call:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
When the truth is that the unedited audio actually went like this:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.
TRANSLATION: George Zimmerman racially profiled the unarmed black teenager he shot.
When it came to Rathergate, CBS was targeting a powerful public figure with the resources to fight back. With Editgate, three major networks have targeted a private citizen, a man who does not appear to be wealthy, who has not been charged with a crime, who is innocent until proven guilty, and who is currently in hiding with a bounty on his head.
Worse still, these malicious attempts to paint Zimmerman as a liar and racist are not only attacks on Zimmerman, but through the intentional enflaming of racial divisions based on false and half-baked information, this is also an attack on the American people–especially the people currently sitting in the front row in Sanford, FL.
After the investigation we all want to see, it may very well be discovered that George Zimmerman committed a crime. But if it comes out that he in fact did act in justifiable self-defense, he’ll probably have lawyers beating down his door for a piece of ABC, CNN, and NBC.
Yesterday at the New York Times, Brian Stelter (whom last Friday broke the story of another former NBC employee receiving his pink slip on a Friday afternoon), reported that the producer responsible for smearing Zimmerman has been fired. But NBC is refusing to release the name of the producer, thus risking, as documentary maker Evan Coyne Maloney noted on Twitter, that he’ll go on to repeat this sort of incident elsewhere. While Stelter’s story claims, “Inside NBC, there was shock that the segment had been broadcast,” for NBC, ultimately, it’s really not that big a deal:
Citing an anonymous network executive, Reuters reported that “the ‘Today’ show’s editorial control policies — which include a script editor, senior producer oversight and in most cases legal and standards department reviews of material to be broadcast — missed the selective editing of the call.”
On April 4, the network news division said in a statement that it deeply regretted the “error made in the production process.”
“We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers,” the network said.
It did not specify what steps it would take. But one day later it dismissed a Miami-based producer who had worked at NBC for several years.
The people with direct knowledge of the firing characterized the misleading edit as a mistake, not a purposeful act.
Read that last sentence a couple of times and let it sink in — and then go back and read Nolte’s article in its entirety, to place it into context with all of the other attacks that the left have thrown at Zimmerman. As John writes, it’s entirely possible that Zimmerman could well be judged with a crime — but that’s for a court of law, not for a TV producer in his editing bay.
But then, as Glenn Reynolds writes, “It’s been clear since RatherGate, at least, that [the MSM is] willing — indeed, happy and, among their peers, even proud — to lie in the service of promoting Democrats. It’s only embarrassing when the public catches on.”
And as Tom Maguire adds, despite all of the information we now know about both Zimmerman and Martin since the story first broke, Old Media isn’t going to let facts get in the way of a good narrative, particularly during an election year. Which brings us to Jay Cost at the Weekly Standard:
If Obama is reelected with such terrible feelings about the national condition, it will be unprecedented in the history of public opinion polling. Obviously, that would be no little feat, so what this president is doing is a classic case of misdirection.
The country needs a bad guy to blame for its problems, so day in and day out Obama is providing them with a smorgasbord of villains from which to choose: Wall Street, Big Oil, the Tea Party, Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, the Supreme Court, the Catholic Church, and so on. In fact, virtually everything that comes out of this president’s mouth is about redirecting blame onto some straw man.
This is why Obama does not care if his attacks are unfair, untrue, unoriginal, unseemly, or whatever. He has only one goal: The state of the union stinks right now, and I must keep that stench off me.
And the MSM is happy to do its best to provide stories that do just that. Look, squirrel!
Related: Look! Neo-Nazis in Sanford, Florida! Or not. “Did anyone bother to contact the Sanford Police? I did, and the Sanford Police deny any indication of Neo-Nazi groups patrolling in Sanford.”
Update: Mickey Kaus is on “Nameless Scapegoat Watch.”
NBC doesn’t even have Rose Mary Woods’ excuse for their missing 18 1/2 syllables: “Ooops, my foot slipped on the dictation machine pedal.” (Pedal is right. NBC’s pedalling something, alright.)
Audio editing cost Nixon his Presidency — modern media’s crowning moment of glory. What should NBC’s audio editing cost them? I’m thinking FCC license to broadcast…
“… who has not been charged with a crime, who is innocent until proven guilty, and who is currently
in hiding with
“A BOUNTY ON HIS HEAD.” !!!
In 2012 America?!? A Bounty on His Head??!!?? In HIDING?!?
And this somehow is seemingly acceptable to a large portion of our “public?”
A reversion to barbarism?
If the races were reversed, and there was a “Bounty” — what then?
Rather than rising and moving foward into the future, these “racialist” leaders are devolving and duplicating the tactics of the KKK.
By their actions, they are giving approval to these KKK tactics —
Their only objection is to who they might be used against.
Martin Luther King, Jr. must be crying.
http://youtu.be/c1tBmqfvamw Here is a case in Baltimore, where a Trayvon like attack occured. Unfortunatly, the victim was unarmed. If he had responded with deadly force, the black attacker would have been declared a victim and an innocent hero.
If Obama had a son, he’d look like the attacker!
The other thing to note is whether is Sandra Fluke, or George Zimmerman, or this weekend’s outrage over the temerity of Augusta National to continue to be a private male membership club, the goal of the media isn’t really for any resolution to these problems in the near future. The goal is to set up the general narrative and keep finding new ancestors to further push the same message.
So if the public doesn’t find giving $1,000 a year to 30-year-olds for free contraception a compelling gender rights matter, or if the Trayvon Martin narrative keeps slipping away from them, they’re not going to say they’re sorry or consider looking at the case differently. The media, Obama and the Democrats are just going to go out and find new instances between now and Nov. 6 to express their outrageous outrage, where the facts initially remain vague and can be more easily folded into the narrative to convince swing voters of the inherent evil on the right — and then, if the details start becoming too uncomfortable, as with Fluke or Martin, they’ll just move on to the next Blockbuster of the Month.
(The other thing that makes Obama an effective-at-the-outset spokesperson for this kind of stuff is having grown up in the hothouse of the left side of the Democratic Party, and having been nurtured by those people to be the vessel to get their ideology enacted into law, he’s the most cocooned president in U.S. history. Obama actually believes the stuff he says about the general evilness of his opponents, because that’s the way he’s been brought up, and he was sheltered by others on the left in academia, politics in Illinois and even the U.S. Senate from ever having to deal with opposing ideologies on an intellectual basis. So it’s not Bill Clinton tossing out red meat to fire up the True Believes that he knows is mostly BS — Like Paul Krugman, cowering back in his seat during his join appearance with Bill O’Reilly on Tim Russert’s show because he’s actually convinced himself that Fox News madman might physically attack him, Obama is all in on the “conservatives are evil” stuff places like the Daily Kos or Media Matters churn out.)
Look, you bunch of bible-thumping, gun-clinging morons! NBC knew Zimmerman was a racist. As if there’s any other possibility. They knew what he said before he said it, and knew what he meant to say regardless of what the 911 tape allegedly purports to have recorded. It’s NBC’s JOB to make the news, and to make it right. Now quit whining, turn off the computer, and go watch CNN.
I wonder what color the editor is?
Just askin’.