By Mollie Hemingway
Thursday, May 26, 2016
A new Katie Couric documentary advocating gun control was
deceptively edited to make Second Amendment supporters look foolish, audio
released by the supporters shows.
In “Under the Gun,” Couric asks a group of gun rights
supporters, “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you
prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?” The documentary filmmakers
spliced in footage of the activists sitting silently for nine seconds. One man
looks down, seemingly uncomfortable, during the awkward silence. The
documentary then moves on to the next scene of a cylinder on a revolver being
closed.
Couric documentarians fabricated this moment, using
footage from a session that was unrelated to the question asked. In fact,
according to audio of Couric’s interview provided by the gun rights activists,
they all rushed to respond to to Couric, providing answers based on principle
and practical concerns. “Well, one — if you’re not in jail, you should still
have your basic rights,” said one of the gun owners. Others responded as well.
You can watch the offending section — and hear the actual
audio that was spliced out — here.
It’s a stunning betrayal of journalistic ethics.
This willful and malicious doctoring of evidence to
support an agenda is so unconscionable that even CNN, The Washington Post, The New
York Times, and other media outlets made note of it.
Couric should have disclaimed the documentary and
publicly acknowledge her error. Instead, the film’s director Stephanie Soechtig
indirectly admitted she spliced in false footage when she issued the following
statement:
My intention was to provide a pause
for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before
presenting the facts on Americans’ opinions on background checks. I never
intended to make anyone look bad and I apologize if anyone felt that way.
This mealy mouthed mush was described as an apology at
CNN while The Washington Post openly
mocked the “apologize if” construction of the response. Erik Wemple of the Post added that he’d never seen a
“thinner, more weaselly excuse” than the one proffered by Soechtig. For her
part, Couric said “I support Stephanie’s statement and am very proud of the
film.”
Wemple says that’s nowhere near good enough and
concludes, “An apology, retraction, re-editing, whatever it is that filmmakers do
to make amends — all of it needs to happen here.”
Of course, this type of cut-and-splice “journalism” is
common these days. Journalists have been praising “The Daily Show’s” use of
deceptively edited interviews for as long as “The Daily Show” has deceptively
edited them. Pretty much every time we hear that some cable comedian has
“destroyed” some outgroup or the views the outgroup holds, that’s thanks to
deceptive editing.
A few other things are worth noting here. One is how
media outlets praised this faux-documentary prior to this particularly
egregious example of manipulation. The AP’s story by Lynn Elber was headlined,
“Gun violence gets more nuanced, probing coverage.” I’d hate to see something
non-nuanced or non-probing! The article goes on to say the documentary
“examines why those on opposite sides of stricter gun laws can’t find common
ground.”
On Media Treatment
of ‘Edited’ Videos
You know where this is going. Beginning last July, the
Center for Medical Progress began releasing videos showing Planned Parenthood
officials discussing the trafficking of human body parts obtained from
abortions performed in clinics. The videos were shocking. Planned Parenthood
began robotically issuing talking points calling the videos “edited” or
“deceptively edited,” in an attempt to protect its organization from a public
relations nightmare.
That Planned Parenthood would respond to these videos in
such a way is not surprising. But our entire media industrial complex attempted
to circumvent the findings of the Center for Medical Progress’ videos by
calling them “edited” or “deceptively edited” as well. If they said it once,
they said it eleventy billion times.
It is true that all video journalism is edited. One
hundred-freaking-percent of it. Every single video package you watch on the
nightly news is edited. None of these videos are called “edited,” of course,
but they are. In the same way that all other video journalism is edited, yes,
the Center for Medical Progress’ was, too.
But unlike every other documentary team, the Center for
Medical Progress did something telling. They released, along with their
mini-documentaries, the full unedited footage they obtained in their undercover
journalistic efforts.
Planned Parenthood paid for an audit of the videos from a
left-wing Democratic opposition research firm called Fusion — an audit that the
media were happy to accept and spread — to support the talking point that the
videos were edited. Even so, that audit admitted “no widespread evidence of
substantive video manipulation.”
An independent audit and forensic analysis of the videos
likewise said that they were “authentic and show no evidence of manipulation.”
As I wrote on Twitter:
Nothing
like this was done in the (Planned Parenthood) videos, yet
"journalists" can't refer to them without calling them
"edited."
Indeed, when Katie Couric ran interference for Cecile
Richards, doing a lengthy sit-down puffball interview and a tour of an abortion
clinic where she didn’t once mention, uh, abortion, she twice decried the
videos as “edited.” Couric is a long-time pro-abortion activist, not just using
the mainstream media to advocate it, but having marched in support of the right
to end unborn human lives. Last week on David Axelrod’s podcast, she said that
her parents were major influences on her, specifically citing her mother’s
volunteer work for Planned Parenthood and the fact that her mother invested in
Trojan condoms when she learned about the AIDS crisis. Classy!
An accompanying write-up of the Cecile Richards interview
falsely stated:
The videos, some of which were
edited together in a way to depict Planned Parenthood employees talking about
selling fetal tissue, which is illegal, rocked the organization.
The media have straight-up adopted Planned Parenthood’s
false “deceptively edited” talking points and carried the water for Planned
Parenthood’s campaign against the Center for Medical Progress. Here, one of
their perky own in the mainstream media is caught red-handed actually
deceptively editing in the service of gun control, and the most outrage The New York Times can muster is the
headline, “Audio of Katie Couric interview shows editing slant in documentary,
site claims.” What a joke our mainstream media are.
No comments:
Post a Comment