…And you’re Andrea Mitchell, you may want to rethink doubling down on not apologizing for your network’s deceptive edit of a campaign appearance, no matter how much you hate anyone with an (R) after his name:

As the Rhetorican writes, “MSNBC is becoming cable news’ Home of the Edit-gate, with their journalistic standards evidently being as solid as Michael Moore’s commitment to document the truth:”

Mitchell addresses the matter with a pathetic ‘We didn’t know‘.  Really!?  How did your producers get to the bit they found so newsworthy without watching the video from the beginning?

As someone who’s worked for cable channels and cable shows for over a decade, I can assure you that no producer worth a cable news paycheck would even begin to put a piece for air together without first watching the source footage from beginning to end – UNLESS said producer is told in advance by a supervisor how the piece should look and where the “money soundbite” may be found (but how did the supervisor come to know this in the first place?), which is a perfectly legitimate way of producing for air.  But that’s not news reporting.  That’s mere entertainment; or – in this case – propaganda.

Read the whole thing, and then click over to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, who adds:

Wow.  Thank goodness Andrea Mitchell is an honest-to-goodness journalist, instead of just a talk-show host on an occasionally-watched cable channel … or worse yet, just a blogger.  So, we can now assume that NBC News enforces no standards on truth or ethics on its own correspondents, and doesn’t just exempt the MSNBC opinion-show hosts, right?

Yes, I think that’s a reasonable assumption — and one that I hope the Romney campaign, unlike their hapless GOP predecessors in 2008 has reached as well.

Update: “Memo to NBC: What the hell is wrong with you?” And…Wawa-loo!

More: At Twitchy, “#HowardKurtzTweets: ‘Real Journalist’ fails to keep up with ‘just bloggers,’ instant gold:”

Our sides can’t take much more aching! “Real journalist” CNN’s Howard Kurtz tweeted out a heck of a scoop regarding the Romney “Wawa-gate” video! Only, you know, an entire day late. D’oh! You see, “just a blogger” SooperMexican broke that story wide open yesterday.

Howard will report no news before its time.