April 10, 2012

NBC's "He Looks Black" - Now You See It, Now You Don't

NBC is busy taking down the evidence of itsrepeated usage of its bogus edit of the George Zimmerman 911 call. This follows the firing of a producer for the use of the same bad edit on theMarch 27 Today Show. Left unanswered - what about the March 22 use on the Today Show?

Twelve days ago Dan Riehl found this at MSNBC:

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black,” Zimmerman told a police dispatcher from his car. His father has said that Zimmerman is Hispanic, grew up in a multiracial family, and is not racist.

The use of ellipsis clearly indicate that the conversation was clipped.  This version has since been re-edited (without any explanation) to include the complete exchange.

Yesterday the discovery by Les Jones of two similar bad edits at NBC 6 Miami for stories from March 19 and March 20 were widely broadcast by theInstaPundit.


 As of this writing, those stories have been "fixed" by the web editors to eliminate the troublesome passages (and are marked as updated April 9; the specific update is unexplained). Fortunately, the original versions live on in Google Caches and screen shots taken by Les Jones, shown below.

And on Monday Jeralyn Merritt discovered, with Lexis, this Today Show transcript from March 22 with the same bad edit.  So far that is still online, but a screenshot is below.

So, it seems to be a bit of a race - can NBC sweep this down the memory hole before the crowd notices?

They just might succeed - the firing of a producer for one bad edit on the March 27 Today Show got a lot of attention and the Daily Caller knows the scorebut I have seen no Elite Media mention of the scope of this problem: twice on the Today Show plus twice at NBC 6 Miami plus once at MSNBC (which was their version of an NBC 6 Miami story) makes five appearances of the bad edit, yet the media coverage is of a producer fired for one March 27 use.  Three usages have been airbrushed away with no notice; Lexis will preserve the March 22 Today Show, but that won't matter if no one looks.

Just to duplicate Les Paul, here are the NBC 6 Miamioriginals:

Trayvon Martin's Shooter Defended By Fellow Neighborhood Watch Captain

The "He looks black" portion was dropped with no obvious replacement in the latest version.

And:

White House Monitoring Trayvon Martin Case as Protests Mount

A state stand your ground law might prevent any prosecution

Christina Hernandez, Jeff Burnside and Edward B. Colby

Lest you doubt, Jeralyn Merritt and Les Paul have some links and contemporaneous accounts of this reality.

Lets see if NBC can be prodded into an even more comprehensive investigation and report.  They can explain again how time constraints led to a mistake on the air twice and in print three times. 

TO BE FAIR:  NBC might want to segue to the old "Cut and Paste ate my brain" defense.  A mistake made once just rumbled through their echo chamber, with multiple editors at multiple sites noticing nothing.  Rodeo clowns without malice.  Might work. But did they ever give Bush a break when he rolled with the "I'm too stupid to be evil" defense?  They did not.

AND ON THE BRIGHT SIDE:  We can't get Howard Kurtz and the Bigfoot media watchers to take on NBC, but at least NBC is reading their critics.  Let me check to see if they hit the tipjar.  (There is no tipjar.)

Posted by Tom Maguire on April 10, 2012 | Permalink

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