Rep. James Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat, recently told a C-SPAN caller that “sexting” is an important tool for organizing voters.
Clyburn seemed to confuse basic “texting” with “sexting” — which involves sending sexual messages or photos — during a Labor Day weekend appearance on C-SPAN to promote his new memoir.
Clyburn, 74, told an anguished caller that Americans concerned about the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin shootings should employ Twitter, Facebook and “sexting” to organize.
“Use the tools that we have,” he encouraged the woman. “We’ve got great tools to communicate about everything else. We can, uh, text. Uh, what do we call it? Sexting. Let’s do some voting, uh, uh, organizing over the internet. We’ve got the tools. Let’s use them for a new massive movement that will make sure that we can have in November 2014 the kind of turnout at the polls that we had, uh, in 2012 in November.”
Although the video is crystal clear, the C-SPAN transcript of the exchange leaves out the congressman’s mention of “sexting.”
“We can text. What do we call it? We have great tools to communicate,” the transcript reads.
The C-SPAN website says that the transcript was taken from the “uncorrected Closed Captioning.”
C-SPAN operations manager Steve Strother told The Daily Caller, “C-SPAN does not produce transcripts. The Closed Captioning is produced live as the event occurs by a 3rd party and we cannot edit the text of the closed captioning. The text will not be corrected.”