NBC Lies; Claims "Mistake" In Zimmerman 911 Editing Due To Constraints Imposed By Fast-Paced, Information Dense 3 Hour Long Today Show Gabfest

That's enough of a lie right there. The Today show is not a 22 minute nightly broadcast. It's a 3 hour waste of viewers time in which wasting time is feature, not a bug.

That's like me saying that I completely mistated the plot of a movie in an 1800 word review because I just didn't have the pixels to spare.

But this lie is also disproven by the fact that the exact same edit, in print form, ran on an NBC Website before it aired on Today.

Les Jones shows us that on March 19 an NBC team in Miami ran the same problematic edit in the print version of their Trayvon Martin coverage:

On his call to police, Zimmerman called Martin, a junior at Krop Senior High School in Miami, “a real suspicious guy.”

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black,” Zimmerman said, while calling police from his car. He said Martin was wearing a gray hoodie and had “his hand in his waistband.”

The bylines for that story are Christina Hernandez, Jeff Burnside and Edward B. Colby. And don't be fooled by the April 2 dateline at the top - the dateline at the bottom is Mar 19 and the Jay Carney "we here in the White House are aware of the incident" quote is from Mar 19.

Um, were they trying to save precious pixel space on a website?

What was the excuse for this first deceptive edit?

Can't be the same excuse Today offers.

Here's the NYT's media reporter, Brian Stetler, offering his Skeptical, Cynical, Hard-Charging, Dig Up Every Juicy Story reporter's intuition on the matter:

‏to me, the simplest explanation is a time-pressed producer cut the audio to save precious seconds in the segment.

This sums up media bias in a nutshell.

If you assume that liberals are Good, then you assume there's no point digging into a story where liberals are accused of malfeasance because you have already decided it's very unlikely there's a story there.

You'd be wasting your time. Liberals are Good. There is no point questioning their motives-- its just a great big waste of your time to do so.

On the other hand, you know where the juicy stories are likely to be -- that's right, those damned conservatives.

So "flood the zone" on that type of story, because you'll probably find something, right? And if that results in flood the zone coverage of conservatives and airy dismissals of any suggested malfeasance by a liberal, Oh well!

And also -- if you spend weeks and weeks investigating conservative malfeasance you were pretty sure was there, but it turns up a dry hole -- oh well, publish it anyway. Like the NYT's attempt to smear John McCain with an affair. Nothing there, but print anyway; just insinuate what you can't report.

Or Bush's TANG records. Nothing there, but this shifty, oddball character says he just came across "TANG records from 1971" via a secret unnamed source. Print it!

Hey, you've worked two hours a day, four days a week on this for the past five weeks! you're not going to squander this actual 40-hour workweek just because the story came up bust-o!

More NBC won't even say that anyone's been fired.

So why do we think he was? That Mark Stetler guy says so, but he also believes in leprechauns and faeries, so.

Constraints Imposed By Fast-Paced, Information Dense 3 Hour Long Today Show Gabfest&bodytext=That's enough of a lie right there. The Today show is not a 22 minute nightly broadcast. It's a 3 hour waste of viewers time in which wasting time is feature, not a bug. That's like me saying that I...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 06:14 PM

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