Trump is in office, so deceptive edits were always going to happen because the liberal media is a Trump-deranged circus act right now. The amount of times they’ve been wrong has been epic. Even things that aren’t even Trump-related, like the possible death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, was a total whiff. NBC News’ Katy Tur threw gasoline on this one when she said it was confirmed by two US officials that Kim was braindead after heart surgery. The tweet was soon deleted, but the media blew the story and no consequences were rendered. Kim is alive, by the way. Well, it looks like Tur isn’t the only one peddling fake news. Enter Chuck Todd, host of Meet the Press, and a fixture of American political news. Oh, how the mighty have fallen here. Todd had his moments of bias, but this is on a new level. He used a deceptively edited quote from Attorney General Barr about the Department of Justice’s decision to drop the criminal charges against Michael Flynn after it was exposed that he was a victim of an FBI entrapment plot. Todd proceeded to have a panel discussion about it. It was all nonsense. Bronson wrote about it over the weekend:
You’re correct. Earlier today, we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis. The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error.
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 10, 2020
Today on Meet The Press, @chucktodd wildly took context out of an answer AG Bill Barr gave about his decision to drop the case into Gen. Michael Flynn.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 10, 2020
I cut Todd's segment along with Barr's full answer together. Look at how blatantly dishonest this is. pic.twitter.com/tODOEwL48V
NBC's Chuck Todd played a deceptively edited clip of Attorney General William Barr's response to a question regarding the attorney general's decision to dismiss charges against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Not only were Barr's comments taken out of context, Chuck Todd accused Barr of not citing "the rule of law" when the attorney general specifically stated the "rule of law" in his answer.
"In closing, this was a big decision in the Flynn case, to say the least. When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written? What will it say about your decision making?" asked CBS' Catherine Herridge during an interview with Attorney General Barr on Thursday.
"Well, history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who's writing the history. But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law. It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice," Barr responded.
NBC edited the video of Barr's answer to remove the whole "rule of law" part, and then Chuck Todd accused the attorney general of failing to cite the rule of law in his answer.
And yet, again, these clowns wonder why their trust numbers with the public are in the toilet. Former CNN producer Steve Krakauer is trying to get the media to return to a sense of credibility and legitimacy with his Fourth Watch newsletter and he noted two things about this incident. One, a tweet from the Meet the Press account appears to be the only correction offered, which is atrocious. Second, he noted that this incident shows the blind spot that we’ve all seen since Trump was elected. The media’s instincts are dead—and Todd, who isn’t a raging partisan on-air in the likes of Rachel Maddow, shows this disease has taken him as well (via Fourth Watch) [emphasis mine]
…[T]he tweet was, as of this moment, the only form of "correction" that has come, now nearly 48 hours later. And it wasn't even an original tweet - it was a response to a DOJ spokesperson. It has 3,300+ RTs, but likely has not been seen by even a small portion of the accounts 630,000+ followers, because a reply is only seen by mutual followers of both accounts. Meet The Press has millions of viewers on NBC every Sunday, and another several hundred thousand through multiple re-airs on MSNBC. This mistake will not appear corrected for those viewers.
But more alarming is the blindspot it reveals about Todd and his show staff. Chuck Todd is smart, and he knows D.C. politics - but in this Trump Era, he can hear a quote like that from AG Barr, which sounds almost like a caricature of what a smarmy, corrupt lawyer would say, and assume that's the full context.
Editing mistakes happen in the media -another was called out from CBS' 60 Minutes last night too - but few are as obvious and absurd as this. And it would be one thing to play the out-of-context clip, and ask a panel guest to respond to it, but Todd's riff on what Barr didn't do is precisely what Barr actually did. It's sloppy, but also revealing. Smart members of the media are no longer as perceptive as they were pre-Trump Era - their instincts are broken. It's also lazy - did not a single producer, let alone Todd, actually watch the full interview to realize how dishonest the clip edit was?
The mistake was minor, but the blindspot it reveals was major - it shows yet another example of the media's rush to believe the worst of this current administration, and gives their audience another reason to lose faith in them as neutral purveyors of the truth.
We have Chuck Todd and his crew possibly not watching full clips, feminists writing op-eds in The New York Times saying that hurting future sexual assault survivors is worth it if it means booting Trump; speaking about the allegations against Joe Biden, and overall, the Russian collusion myth peddlers not being held accountable. MSNBC is a network that trotted out the debunked Trump dossier as fact. It wasn’t. So many heads would roll given the media’s absolutely atrocious record since 2016, but the fish rots from the head. And I don’t mean the editors-in-chief or the executive editors, I’m pointing right at the source: The Democratic Party.
Also, how dare we highlight gross corruption and malfeasance at the DOJ over the Flynn fiasco. Obama's goons went off the rails here. We all know it. When the liberal media can't spin or defend their Democrat allies, the knives do come out, don't they?
Sad pathetic man https://t.co/r2oOc52UFB
— Matt Vespa (@mVespa1) May 10, 2020
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