Turn in Your "J" Card, Katie

I expect that conservatives would scream a great deal less about left-leaning media bias if, to be honest, the media were less biased.  Every indication seems to bear the fear out; the media are as corrupt as Donald Trump says, and journalistic integrity has long since given way to journalistic license.

As presented in this piece in CNN, a documentary called "Under the Gun" was recently released, including an interview by the former journalist Katie Couric, with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

"If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorist from walking into, say, a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?", Couric asks the League members.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable question to which members of a pro-firearms and pro-2nd Amendment group would be able to reply immediately.  In reality, they did reply immediately, and raw, unedited audio recordings of the interview plainly show that.

Of course, that did not fit the liberal, anti-gun views of the producer, the director and Katie Couric.  So they did what leftists do -- they changed the content to fit their narrative.  Instead of letting the video run and showing the answers that the League members gave in the timing with which they were given, the final cut show them looking down, silently, as if they did not know how to answer the question.

The "looking down" content, eight seconds worth, not only did not represent nor present the League members' actual reaction time or answer to the question; it was grafted into the final edit from footage of when they were sitting and waiting for the interview to start.

I don't know what school of journalism in the USA teaches its students that it is OK to do that.  It is generally accepted to edit, as was in fact done with Couric's actual question, to delete extra words as long as they don't alter the context of the unedited version.  And having heard the raw tape of the question, it is fine as edited; they took out some of her words that did not change the meaning or tone of the question.

But it is certainly eleven kinds of unethical to insert content in a place where (A) it didn't exist in the first place, and (B) is inserted to foster the questioner's political narrative (not to mention embarrassing the people who actually answered).

Stephanie Soechtig, the piece's director, claimed that she herself had editorial control.  As she stated in a non-apologetic response to being caught, "My intention was to provide a pause for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before presenting the facts on Americans' opinions on background checks."

But even that is a crock -- the piece went to a commercial break after the eight seconds of grafted non-response.  If you ask a question, you kind of have to show the answer in its original context.

Couric, for her part, issued one of those leftist non-apologies, saying something like "I'm sorry if the intent of the edit was misinterpreted" or something like that -- she's not sorry she tried to manipulate the facts to fit her politics; she's barely sorry she got caught -- in other words, it's our fault for being such cretins that we can't understand the artistic license she took.

Journalism, as I have written recently, has taken plenty of body blows over the decades of its declared freedom in the USA, mot all of them self-inflicted.  Katie Couric, if she ever could be called a journalist, has forfeited her right to be considered one of the fraternity.

She is entitled to her own version of topics of contention.  She is entitled to vote for whomever she wants to in the privacy of the election booth.  She is entitled to go on TV and advocate explicitly for causes that she has those opinions on.

What she is not entitled to do is to misuse the platform of  journalism by altering the facts on which that opinion is based.  Argue with the interviewees, sure.  Misuse her position by altering their response?  Well, no.  That is criminality in the world of true journalism.

Katie Couric spent plenty of time at NBC, the same people who did a totally misleading edit of the 911 call by George Zimmerman, in 2012 when he was watching Trayvon Martin, whom he later shot to avoid having his head banged into the sidewalk more than it was.  NBC at least fired the producer who did the editing.  They had to get caught first, but they did fire the guy.

Katie Couric didn't have the integrity to man up and confess to manipulating the facts -- in the case, the video -- to suit her own narrative.

Give up your "J card", Katie.  You've forfeited your right to be called a journalist.

 Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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