Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The “Inadvertent” Editing At NBC

2 Comments

I have some thoughts on NBC’s bias, and media bias in general, over at PJMedia.

[Update a while later]

Similar thoughts over at Breitbart.com.

[Update early afternoon]

Matt Welch: When losers write history.

[Update later in the afternoon]

A commenter at my PJMedia piece has recreated the editing process:

Original quote as heard on the 911 tapes:

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around, looking about.
911 DISPATCHER: Okay, is this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

I guess some unknown NBC ‘senior producer’ was told the quote was too long to include in the broadcast segment and it needed to be cut to no longer than 5 seconds in order to fit time constraints.

First Round: Obviously the first thing to do when trimming a Zimmerman quote to fit the time allotted is to cut out anything that wasn’t said by Zimmerman;

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around, looking about.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Nope, it’s still too long, we need to cut more.

Second Round, of course, reprising the weather report for that night is Sanford Florida is unnecessary and might be confusing to viewers who don’t live in Central Florida.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. He’s just walking around, looking about.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Still too long, we obviously need to cut more.

Third round: We take out the passive ‘stage direction’ parts of Zimmerman’s dialog that really don’t contribute to the action that we need to hold viewer’s attention.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Fourth round: It’s closer but the quote is still a little too long to fit into the time slot.

Now Legal gets into the act and tells the editor that an on the air accusation that someone might be on drugs, even in a quote from a third party, might expose the station to a defamation lawsuit and they want the offending words removed .

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or something.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Fifth round: Now we’re almost there; just a couple of more words to trim and the quote will fit into the 5 second window allotted.

Running the remaining text through the NBC Writers Style Guide shows that without the ‘on drugs’ direct action object that Legal had removed, the words ‘or something’ are duplicative and softens the narrative line established by ‘up to no good’ action group and weakens the emotional impact of the entire quote.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Sixth Round: Now we’ve almost got it. All we need to do now is take out the dead air blank caused by removing the Dispatchers unnecessary comments from the quote and we’ve got our 5 second quote.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, he looks black.
Yeah!! We did it and we only had to go to Legal Once@!!

/sarc off

The frightening thing is, it’s entirely plausible.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

EditGate

12 Comments

Was worse than Rathergate™:

The media dishonestly going after the president of the United States is wrong, but it goes with the territory, and the target in that case is the most powerful man in the world. That is something completely different from the media using lies and half-baked information to label as racist and a liar a private citizen while he’s in hiding for fear of his life.

Of course, the partisan hacks who did this probably don’t think there was anything wrong with Rathergate™, other than he got caught.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

After Keystone

95 Comments

“We’d rather sell our oil to China.”

What Harper is saying is that Canada could make more money by creating a market for its oil rather than selling all of it solely to the US. In other words, the cost of Canadian oil will go up as the US is forced to compete with China.

…Obama could have approved the pipeline, added 30,000 jobs to the economy, and insured the most secure oil source for our future. Instead, he chose to kill the pipeline and the jobs and, in the process, insured that America will pay more for the oil it does buy. It’s hard to imagine a worse decision, especially since it was all so Obama could deny Republicans a win in the run-up to the next election.

It’s worse, actually, considering the latest news:

Officials in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget told the Treasury Department that the announcement of a conditional commitment to Solyndra was imminent. The department had one day to review the terms of the guarantee to accommodate an Energy Department press release.

“Treasury’s consultative role was not sufficiently defined, the consultation that did occur was rushed and no documentation was retained as to how Treasury’s serious concerns with the loan were addressed,” the audit said.

…The Treasury requested more time for review and later agreed with the Energy Department’s request to expedite the review by March 19, 2009, “so that the press release could be issued on the morning of March 20, 2009,” according to the report.

Got that? A speculative “green” energy project that in retrospect, once the rest of us saw the details, was obviously going to be a business disaster, and ended up costing the taxpayers over half a billion dollars, was approved after a “one-day review.” Yet the president demanded that Keystone, a project with certain and vast energy output, be delayed for many more months so that it could be “adequately reviewed,” despite the fact that it had already had years of review. And as a result our energy prices will now rise in the future, with no way of returning to the status quo. Just as the president told us he wanted them to when he ran four years ago.

The campaign ad this fall almost writes itself. Or themselves.

One wonders what administration defenders are thinking as they watch this ongoing trainwreck. We know what they’re saying, but what are they thinking?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

A Nice Passover Gift For American Jews

14 Comments

Release the Khalidi tape:

Interestingly, that sole Obama remark, as reported by Wallsten, contains an ellipsis in the middle. After the then-state senator says the Khalidis had given him “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases” comes a strategically placed dot-dot-dot. We don’t know what those blind spots and biases were and what he might have thought of them. Or how he might have changed. That, in Wallsten’s or some Times editors’ judgment, was best left on the tape.

So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned “Islamism” and all related words, even “Islam” and “jihad,” from our national security documents. They’re completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer.

It’s interesting to compare this to NBC’s recent journalistic malpractice, in which they elided some words in the middle of a quote to create the false narrative that George Zimmerman was motivated by race in his suspicion of Trayvon Martin. Except in this case, it’s the reverse — to remove potentially damaging comments to show that the president is an “unbiased” “moderate.”

What, indeed, is the LA Times hiding? If they are unwilling to show the tape, they could at least provide the complete quote. They haven’t claimed that a promise to a source prevents them from doing so, though now that I’ve made the request, perhaps that will be their next excuse. At which point, we can safely consign them to the same ill repute in which NBC should reside, even if it does not in the minds of its fellow “journalists.”