First, a quick recap of what NBC News did to George Zimmerman’s 911 call:
Zimmerman answered a police dispatcher’s direct question about Trayvon Martin’s identifying characteristics, and NBC altered it to make it sound like Zimmerman said Martin was up to no good because he was black.
And we’re supposed to believe NBC made an innocent mistake. Reuters:
NBC News’ decision to air an edited call from George Zimmerman to police in the moments before he shot Trayvon Martin was “a mistake and not a deliberate act to misrepresent the phone call,” according to the president of the network’s news division…
Under growing public pressure to explain the incident, NBC News President Steve Capus provided Reuters with the fullest explanation to date of how the edited call made it on air and what the network is doing to prevent such a consequential error from happening again.
Capus confirmed a previous Reuters report that an internal network investigation had determined that a producer made the editing error, and that the network’s editorial controls – including senior broadcast producer oversight, script editors and often legal and standards department reviews of sensitive material to be broadcast – simply missed the selective editing of the phone call.
Two sources at the network told Reuters the Miami-based producer of the segment had been fired on Thursday.
Capus said “several people” involved were disciplined, though he declined to specify the nature of the disciplinary actions, saying they were internal personnel matters.
Or maybe NBC stands for Neuron-Busting Chutzpah.
And now there’s a new wrinkle in the whoopsie defense. As Les Jones notes, NBC Miami made the same deceptive edit in print:
As Tom Maguire points out, that story is credited to Jeff Burnside, Christina Hernandez, and Edward B. Colby. Unlike the Today Show producer, they have names and, presumably, jobs.
And MSNBC used the same deceptively edited quote, before changing it to include the dispatcher’s question and appending a correction at the end of the story.
How did all these NBC employees keep making the same “mistake” over and over — a “mistake” that just so happened to advance the narrative that George Zimmerman is a racist — until it got all the way to the Today Show? Why didn’t anybody in NBC’s many layers of editors and fact-checkers notice this tiny little “error” until those pesky right-wingers brought it up?
Who do they think is buying their Nauseating Bovine Caca?
Update: My question to two of the NBC Miami reporters who made the same “mistake”:
.@jeffburnside & @ChristinaTVNews: Why did you quote George Zimmerman as saying, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good… He looks black”?
— ‘Jim’ ‘Treacher’ (@jtLOL) April 9, 2012
Update: And my questions to the Executive Producer of NBC Miami Today:
@jtLOL this had nothing to do with Miami or me. Nice try. >:-/
— Tammy Delgado (@tvtams) April 8, 2012
@tvtams Would you care to revise your statement? dailycaller.com/2012/04/09/nbc…
— ‘Jim’ ‘Treacher’ (@jtLOL) April 9, 2012
Update: In a vanishingly rare occurrence, Al Sharpton missed a photo op yesterday. Was that his decision, or NBC’s?
Update: NBC has a history of dishonest editing to paint people they don’t like as racists.
