The MSNBC Lesson

If there is anything MSNBC and parent NBC have taught us in the last 10 months or so, it's that apparently it's okay for the "journalists" that these places employ to lie, use deceitful editing tactics and outright make stuff up to push the liberal agenda and make Republicans look bad. In case you missed all of it, here's a summary of what happened:

On March 27, 2012, as reported in this Yahoo! News article, NBC's "Today" show aired the 911 call which supposedly took place between George Zimmerman and a 911 dispatcher. The edited version NBC put together was of course a total misrepresentation that made Zimmerman look like a racist when this wasn't the case at all. Granted, NBC did fire that producer but at that point it was too little, too late. The tape had already been rerun multiple times by NBC and it was out there. It doesn't matter that NBC apologized. It doesn't matter that NBC fired the person involved. Thanks to modern technology, what aired is now out there forever and there are probably still people out there who heard the edited version and have never found out it was doctored by NBC.

In the middle of June, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell was caught selectively editing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to make it look like he had a "supermarket moment" of his own similar to that of George H.W. Bush in 1992. The full video of what was actually said is on the Breitbart page I have linked to. This story was so bad that we actually discussed it on the Sean and Frank Show at 680 WCBM Baltimore during my summer internship with them. I was tasked with gathering the sound bites for that segment which I will also include with this post. As someone studying to be a journalist, I couldn't believe it. And on the video the editing was terrible. There was a clear jump in the tape. Yet the leftist media took it and ran with it. Mitchell did apologize, barely, after media watchdogs caught her. It's doubtful many people who watch her show saw her apology or the unedited clip.





If that wasn't enough, MSNBC's Morning Joe got caught at the end of September! For full explanation of that screw up, follow the link. The anchors and crew of Morning Joe never seriously apologized for falsely editing and reporting on that one. The best we got was essentially, "Come on, guys! We were just trying to be humorous!" Yeah, right.

And that brings us to this week. This time it was MSNBC host Martin Bashir who aired a clearly edited (I mean the jump cut was seriously bad in my opinion) video of the Connecticut gun control hearings where Neil Heslin, father of one of the Newtown victims, asked for a response to his question about why someone should need to own an automatic weapon. The problem is Bashir edited that part out and it makes it look like Heslin was heckled instead. There is still no official apology from anyone at MSNBC at my last check. But like I said above, and it applies to all of these examples, apologies and corrections don't matter much in today's world because once something is published it's out there and it can't be taken back. It doesn't matter that all of these reports were lies because they've already been put out there and the public is running with them. And MSNBC doesn't make much effort to admit its mistakes to its viewing audience anyway, at least from what I've experienced.

Despite the fact that NBC and MSNBC have proven themselves incapable of truthfully reporting the news through these incidents, people still turn to these outlets to get their news. But what I think is even worse is that I know people in the journalism school here at Maryland who still want to work at these places. They want to be a part of "news" organizations that constantly twist the facts and push agendas and pass it off as "news".

That is part of why journalism is going down the drain in this country. Current journalism students see what passes as "news" these days at the big, left-wing media giants and for some reason decide they want to be like that. Then they graduate, get jobs at these media giants and the cycle continues. The false reporting and the biased reporting begin in the journalism schools now, where we as students are supposed to learn "neutral, non-biased reporting". Rush Limbaugh hits on this very topic all the time on his show and I'm here as a real example of what he talks about. The kind of "journalism" done by MSNBC, CNN, etc. is taught as "acceptable" while I've witnessed some professors take blatant shots at Fox News, Drudge Report and other "Conservative" news outlets in my classes. It truly is sad.

Jimmy Williams