Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic ABC News Edited Out Key Parts of Sarah Palin Interview

From Newsbusters :

They highlight some of the deceptive edits and have a link to the entire transcript, so you can see for yourself. They used edits to distort her positions on a lot of things. I've thought for years that the MSM was biased in a liberal slant, but this was still kinda shocking.

It's the equivalent of reading a review that says "this is nowhere near a great movie" and then "quoting" it as "this is...a great movie." Except this was less honest, IMO, as they didn't include the tv versions of the ellipses.

I understand a lot of you disagree with Gov. Palin's stands on, well, everything, but that's not the point. How can we make a reasoned decision with this kind of media distortion going on?

PJ

I did notice a couple of odd edits when I watched Thurs night [forgot to set TIVO for Friday =/].

I was reminded of a Simpsons episode where someone presents a video tape of Homer confessing to something, but the clock in the background jumps all over the place between every word.

I knew he took her comments about national leaders and war of God or whatever out of context [not including the sentence before or after which changed the meaning completely] and that he has defined Bush Doctrine multiple ways [as has pretty much everyone over the last 8 years - it's evolved - and I don't think Bush has ever called it that but... *shrug*] so that she asked for clarification seemed perfectly legitimate to me but Charlie looked down his glasses at her IMO.

I'll have to read the whole transcript when the kiddos are asleep.

Carol

I think I saw a poll that said that more and more people were turning to the internet.

As for the interview, I'm waiting for it to hit Factcheck (my goodness those people can't update fast enough), hopefully they'll say something about the edits too, but for the moment Politifact looks at two of her statements, one of them being the Lincoln thing which had some people losing their minds.

alcyone

I've had to turn off the talking heads. Too many blatantly bias and idiotic comments. I'm trying to de-stress my life.

Yesterday, I watched (briefly) the Mike and Juliet show (Fox) and was stupefied at the antics they were stooping to in a clear effort to throw mud at Palin.

They looked at her ABC interview. And I guess since they couldn't really criticize her performance in traditional ways, they turned down the sound and "read" her body language.

:rolleyes:

Yes. it was amazing... the way they could tell what she "actually" was thinking by the way she leaned forward (angry) or the way her eye seem to twitch if you played it slow motion...



After 5 minutes I was screaming at the T.V.



Hitting the OFF button brought blessed peace.

Yes, it might be tough (because they are EVERYWHERE), but I'm sure l can glean the facts without listening to these idiots.

Thanks so much for the heads up.... and the link.

From the outside looking in, I have to say, that my impression has always been that this is par for the course in the US. You guys are only noticing now?

So, why only highlight when Palin is the victim of what seems to be woefully lax standards in US political interviewing? (I despair when I see what passes for serious political interviewing in the US media).

Why no thread when it's Obama being edited or misrepresented? Why no thread when the media fails to pick up on the hypocrisy involved in statements made by Karl Rove, John McCain, members of his campaign team and Palin herself, when they say something now which is the opposite of what they were saying when it came to slighting the Democrats?

Rove, who belittled a potential VP on Obama's list because he came from a state that was about five times larger than the one Palin comes from, but which Rove deemed small enough to be a non-entity. Palin rubbishing women who whine when questioned by the media that they are the victims of sexism and shouldn't be held up to scrutiny, when she was asked about Clinton, but, of course, it's now a different story entirely when she's on the receiving end.

And on and on and on.

I deplore the standards of your political media. Would I love to see something more serious? Deeper? That deals with the real issues and not trivia? That is honest and informed? And without partisan bias? Absolutely. But since it isn't, I find the outrage when it hits your preferred candidate (and I'm sure there are Democrats out there just as keen to howl when Obama is misrepresented while ignoring the misrepresentation of Palin) when you seemingly have no quarrel with your opponent being misrepresented somewhat hypocritical.

Either complain you have a biased press and long for it to change across the board. Or accept that if you put up with a biased press whose meat and potatoes of daily reporting is to misrepresent and edit to suit their own agenda, then you have to accept it's going to happen to your candidate as well as the ones you don't support.

And you've never been shocked at the breathtakingly outrageous anti-Democrat bias shown nightly on Fox News, I take it? :rolleyes:

What's sauce for the goose, after all...

LabRat

Labby, I realize that the above quote is taken out of context, but I want to respond to it anyway. You are correct when you say that the US news media is biased, either to the left or to the right. It always has been. If you were to read the various accounts of the Boston Massacre in 1770 (where an angry group of citizens threatened a platoon of infantry and got shot at for their troubles), you'll find that some portray the soldiers as bloodthirsty fiends just itching to shoot a colonist at the slightest provocation. You'll also find reports that the soldiers fired on a mob which was bent on tearing them all limb from limb. Some of those same accounts were printed in Britain, too.

Not long ago, I watched a BBC "documentary" which alleged that President Franklin Roosevelt not only knew that the Japanese planned to attack the US, but that he knew the exact date, time, and location of the attack, and that he arranged things so that the US military in Hawaii would have no warning.

One of the pieces of evidence they included was a scratchy recording of two men discussing the timing of the attack. The voices were identified as those of Prime Minister Tojo and Ambassador Nomura of Japan, who was in Washington at the time. The amazing thing is that the recording had both men discussing a top-secret military plan on an open trans-Pacific telephone line - which was supposedly tapped by US Army Intelligence - in English!

That is so far-fetched as to be laughable. That wasn't the only blatant falsehood in the show, but it was the one that jumped the shark for me. So don't get on your high horse and accuse the US media of being biased (which it is, no question) without remembering that every media in the world has a bias. Some are simply more blatant than others.

I agree that we all have to be very careful about our source of news these days, but you have to remember that it's always been that way. The Spanish-American War in 1898 wasn't caused by the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst, but his newspaper empire did whip the public into a frenzy over the alleged mining of the battleship Maine by Spain. (The Spanish didn't blow it up. An explosive fire in a forward coal bunker blew a hole in the ship's bow and sank her, but to read Hearst's headlines you might have thought Spain was set to take Florida and Texas away from the US.)

So let's all be careful about pointing fingers and throwing stones at other people and other nations. I used to watch Hannity and Colmes on Fox until I realized that neither man was all that interested in the answers to the questions they were posing; they were more interested in stating their own opinions in the guise of "interviewing" their guests.

I respect the opinions of others, even when they differ from mine. If everyone in the world thought and acted just like me, it would be a boring place. But we can be interesting without flaming each other.

At least, I hope we can.

Haven't a clue. When's the last time an Obama interview was dishonestly edited to this degree? In general, I don't whine about liberal bias, but this one seemed over the top.

Honestly, I understand that the sides are going to slam each other -- cover-ups here, flip-flops there, hypocrisy everywhere -- but the US media used to try to be nonpartisan. In the UK, frex, you've got the Telegraph and the Guardian (along with lots of other papers) -- with obvious political leanings. And that's fine. Having the bias open and identified helps people sort through what they're reading. A version of "if it's in Pravda, it must not be true" sort of thing

It's just when they refuse to admit to an obvious bias that it grates.

But, as Terry's reminded me, this ain't nuthin' new. And with alternative media (talk radio, internet, Fox News), a lot more information's getting out there. Some of which is even true.

Of course not. Have you ever been shocked by the breathtakingly outrageous far-left bias on the BBC?

PJ

Not to nitpick, but... At over twice the size of Texas (which comes in at #2), Alaska is most definitely the "largest" state. Perhaps Rove meant population-wise? Then again, it's Rove, a man who seems to have a rather narrow viewpoint. :p

Ewww...more tl;dr from alcyone

Bias is another interesting aspect of the elections (which are clearly my current object of obsession). This meanders somewhat off topic, but I have a point related to the interview, I promise! Or something...

So this finding surprised me. Being super skeptical, I dug around and it seems like though the CMPA calls itself non-partisan, it's been criticized from the left. Also note that it runs until July 2008, which makes it recent and yet:

Totally counterintuituve to me.

But the database org, LexisNexis challenges the notion of bias too. This is it's methodology and what it looks at:

This one runs from July to August, it's recent as well. The main findings are:

LN's data pool is around 2,000+, I believe.

Note, however, that online landscape is skewed by left blogs, according to Nielsen (but that's nothing new). Annyway this person\'s analysis for example, is much more intuitive, imo.

He is associated with Fox and finds some similarities with LN in his views of Palin articles just after she got nominated, although his data sample is much smaller. He's also doing his analysis by hand, so to speak.

To supplement the above, there's the Chicago Tribune , which quotes another LexisNexis study. This one looks at 6,000 articles on Palin and finds(the same study is quoted in Editor & Publisher):

I should point out, the last one has a "so far" attached (No Media Bias Against Palin, GOP--So Far). That analysis was limited to last week and the writer is careful in pointing out how quickly that could change.

Maybe the Gibson interview indicates it has?

I'm still mulling all this over, it's been fun, but

alcyone

Part of the issue, too, is which news sources are the ones that are in your home. We don't get Fox News here as part of our regular cable package, for example, but we get ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN as well as the Canadian channels.

I've stopped watching CNN as a result of the primaries - their coverage was so biased , and as well, I've grown tired of the way they don't discuss anything but shout "sound bites" at each other.

Two of the things I noticed about the GIbson-Palin interview:
1. The questions were more specific, less unctuous, than what I'd seen in interviews with Obama during the late spring and summer.
2. Gibson didn't give her a pass when she tried to answer vaguely or avoid the question (which is what all politicians do. Survival skill ) Gibson asked a couple of follow up questions, however. (as all interviewers should in that situation)

btw, I've noticed that Obama uses the debater's trick of defining the question, rather than answering the question. What always surprises me is that the interview doesn't then do a follow-up question.

So it was at least good to see Gibson finally doing an interview that pressed for specifics and used follow-up questions. Hopefully we'll see that in more interviews now.

Back to the Gibson interview - what did people make of his "hubris" question? Has any other candidate been asked directly if his/her running wasn't an act of hubris? I know some newpspapers , both American and Europena, used the term in connection with Obama's trip to Europe. Anyway, what did you make of Gibson's asking Palin the "hubris" question?

also, thanks for starting this thread, Pam. That the interview was edited was "news" to me

c.

I had actually read the transcripts ABC had online before any of the interviews had been aired. I immediately noticed the parts that had been edited out. Plus the editing job was terrible. You could tell when she was about to say something when it would cut to the next question from Gibson.

Gibson has given an interview to both Palin and Obama. Here are questions given to Obama:

How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
How does it feel to "win"?
How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public financing?
What issues are your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of Hillary Clinton's speech?

Here are some questions asked of Palin:

Are you qualified for the job of vice president?
Have you been outside the country before and have you met any foreign leaders?
Isn't it an act of hubris to be seeking the vice presidency?
Do you support guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Georgia and South Ossetia?
Do you support bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO over Russia's objections?
Will you go to war if Russia invades Georgia if Georgia is part of NATO?
Would you support Israel if they decide to attack Iran's nuclear facilities?
Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
Would you send forces into Pakistan to take out terrorists without Pakistan's permission?
Is America engaged in a holy war? Are we on God's side?
Why do you and other Republicans deserve to live? (I threw that in myself, knowing that it was on Gibson's mind <g> )

Shouldn't Gibson have asked even one hard question of Obama? Shouldn't the harder questions be asked of the person at the top of a ticket?

The funniest part is that Gibson was wrong on the Bush Doctrine. The current, and fourth, definition of the Bush Doctrine is not that of pre-emption. The current Bush Doctrine refers to the spread of democracy around the world to fight terrorism. Gibson's definition was the third and now out-of-date version. And no, George Bush has never called anything the "Bush Doctrine." Gibson was looking down his nose at Palin as if wondering why this rube who wants to be VP doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is. Do your own homework, Charlie!

The first version was coined by Charles Krauthammer before 9/11 even happened and had nothing to do with terrorism. It was referring to the United States unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM and Kyoto treaties.

The second version of the Bush Doctrine referred to states who support terrorism would be considered hostile regimes.

The third version involved the policy of pre-emption to prevent a catastrophic event from occurring.

Gibson sensed a gotcha moment and Palin was perfectly correct in asking for clarification since Gibson didn't mention which of the four definitions he was referring to, assuming Gibson even knew there were four.

Thanks, Roger. I appreciate having the two transcripts to compare - I was going by memory.

Next question: Why did Gibson use such different standards for each interview?

c.