Monday, April 9, 2012

The Big Double Standard

Anderw Klavan on media double standards:

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?”

The rest here.

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