Deacon Greg, a newsman prior to wearing the collar, is more than a tad upset, and rightly so, about NBC’s video editing scandal:
Now, in my experience, there are a few logical explanations:
- The audio quality may have been poor, so they cut parts that were hard to understand.
- They needed to trim out the middle material for time.
- An associate producer with an Ivy League education and no common sense decided that the only important part was the “black” part, so he or she elected to cut all that other extraneous stuff that doesn’t sound sexy.
- An associate producer who is clearly an idiot decided to skew the story for sensational effect and boffo headlines.
- The producer overseeing the segment abdicated his or her responsibility and didn’t adequately check the context.
- The producer overseeing the segment actually did due diligence and decided to skew the story for sensational effect.
Whatever happened, there was widespread system failure here — and a deplorable absence of truth. And people wonder why nobody trusts the media. Seriously? It’s crap like this.
Heads should roll.
The mainstream media is increasingly diminishing itself into irrelevance and giving more and more of us fewer and fewer reasons to pay attention. As one who toiled long and hard in the vineyards of broadcast news, I find this stuff infuriating, and more than a little depressing. The nation needs a strong, vigilant, independent and courageous press.
What we’re getting, instead, is lazy reporting, cynical manipulation and lies.
In other words: bullshit.
If you’re not sure what he’s talking about here, please do read the whole thing. Bullshit is being kind.
The Anchoress has her own opinion:
It’s worth mentioning that without the existence of the internet and the many blogs and sites interested in (or in some cased dedicated-to) media scrutiny, we might never have even realized that someone within a mainstream media outlet had played such a devious and potentially destructive hand, with what appears to be a malicious intent.
A friend emailed:
[NBC’s edit is] not only an injustice to Zimmerman to splice that video that way, it was cruel in my mind to do that to African Americans and the parents of that boy – throwing fuel onto a fire, needlessly, through a fabricated distortion of the truth.
Now, if you haven’t seen it, watch the full interview between Piers Morgan and Toure of MSNBC and their heated debate. Ask yourself which audio version of that 911 recording Toure was basing his argument on. Most sources only shared the last 5 minutes of the interview, but I recommend listening to the whole thing to get it all in context.
Yes, do watch the whole thing. It’s interesting to hear Toure note that folks “in the hallways of NBC” were laughing at Piers Morgan and “not challenging,” the Zimmerman narrative.
Perhaps NBC felt the best way to do challenge the Zimmerman narrative was to change it materially, at its factual source.
The Trayvon Martin case is a tragedy, and it has revealed that a nation capable of electing an African-American president has become less-convincingly “post-racial” than many had supposed. Shame on anyone — mainstream media, politician or alt-media crank — who sees the racial tension that has grown from the story (what with the NY Times’ sudden-and-insistent classification of Zimmerman as “a white-Hispanic”, Geraldo’s remarks about hoodies and now NBC’s edit) and makes the dubious, nay evil decision to introduce it to a flammable gas, either through rhetorical hyperbole or outright deceit.
There is evil taking place here… much of it willful, lots of it out of simple ignorance and gullibility.
Something needs to change. Truth needs to get out and quickly or this is going to get uglier than it already is.
And it’s seriously ugly now.
