Surprisingly, ABC hasn’t removed the video wherein one of their highly esteemed producers edited out the First Lady’s claim that the gang bangers who gunned down Hadiya Pendleton used automatic weapons (which must be banned!). Here’s the sanitized version [as above]: “She was standing out in a park with her friends in a neighborhood blocks away from where my kids grow – grew – up, where our house is. And she was caught in the line of fire. I just don’t want to keep disappointing our kids in this country. I want them to know that we put them first.” And here’s the online version with Michelle Obama’s remarks in full . . .
“She was standing out in a park with her friends in a neighborhood blocks away from where my kids…grew up, where our house is. She had just taken a chemistry test. And she was caught in the line of fire because some kids had some automatic weapons they didn’t need,” she said. “I just don’t want to keep disappointing our kids in this country. I want them to know that we put them first.”
mediaite.com reached out to ABC for an explanation. The network sent a statement: “The full story was posted to our website in advance of the interview being broadcast. The edits made to Robin’s interview with the First Lady were made solely for time.”
Your humble scribe was a videotape editor for CNN for three years. I can state without equivocation that ABC’s equivocation is bullshit. The edit removes, what, two-and-a-half seconds of sound out of a 4:31 package?
Nope. Like CBS’ edit of George Zimmerman’s 911 call and faked Bush-era documents, ABC got caught red-handed distorting the news to further a left-leaning agenda. Without any professional or commercial blowback, without smoking gun screw-ups like the online transcript, what’s to stop them from doing it again?