TO BE FAIR, KATIE COURIC KNOWS A LOT ABOUT FAKE NEWS:

Shot: Katie Couric says fake news is ‘tearing’ America ‘apart at the seams.’

—The New York Daily Mail, today.

Chaser:

Of course Yahoo News should fire Katie Couric. She committed an act of gross intellectual dishonesty — and if you don’t fire a journalist for dishonesty, what in hell do you fire one for? Bad manners?

Well, yes. More on that in a bit.

Couric is under fire (you know, like Hillary Rodham Clinton in Bosnia) for her role in an anti-gun documentary (NB: My iPad wants “anti-gun” to be “anti-fun” — changed it three times — and I do not disagree) in which dishonest editing was used to make it look as though pro–Second Amendment activists were unable to answer elementary questions about a gun-rights controversy. This technique is known as “the Jon Stewart.” What you do is take a few seconds (or, in this case, a few minutes) of reaction shots (the footage they shoot of people’s faces while other people are talking) and then insert that non-talking footage after a question is asked: Voilà, the opposition is literally speechless. My friend Jonah Goldberg knows a little bit about this, his Daily Show appearance being an infamous example of editing with malice.

—“Katie Couric & Gun Rights: A Study in Dishonesty,” Kevin D. Williamson, National Review Online, May 29, 2016.