Putting "Applause-gate" to Rest

Guy Benson | January 18, 2011 10:31 AM

Yesterday afternoon, I posted an item pushing back against a nascent blogosphere meme about President Obama and alleged presence of applause prompts during his address to the memorial service in Tucson. A reader who attended the ceremony writes in to affirm the argument I advanced:

Guy, I'm just emailing you to confirm that the [applause] lines on the JumboTron were not cues for the crowd to clap. I was in the choir and sometimes I was watching the Jumbotron because from where I was sitting, occasionally my view of the podium was blocked by one of the cameramen. The captioning was BEHIND the live speaking throughout the night. So the speaker would say a line, it would appear when he was saying his next line. The [applause] appeared AFTER the applause started. It was a live transcription because sometimes there [were] almost embarrassing typos, like "nose" instead of "knows."