Watch: Shocking Video Shows Footage of Trump Address to Nation Was Edited by TV Station
If you thought the media’s slanted coverage of President Donald Trump’s first prime-time address from the Oval Office was bad, just wait. It gets worse.
It appears that a segment of Trump’s address was edited by one news outlet — with results that showed the president in a very bad light.
Todd Herman, a radio host at KTTH in Seattle, reported that a listener alerted him via Twitter to video aired by KCPQ in Seattle.
That video on the tweet appears to be a smartphone recording of the beginning of KCPQ’s coverage of the address — a segment of the Trump speech leading in to a voice-over by the station’s anchor.
Check it out here:
@toddeherman did Q13 doctor the video of Trump’s Oval Office speech? Watch his mouth toward the end of this 10pm teaser pic.twitter.com/F3haXYvVCc
— Jeff Wallis (@jeff_wallis) January 9, 2019
That’s not what viewers of the speech saw.
“We performed a side-by-side comparison of the video from our listener … to the raw video of Trump’s speech from CNN,” Herman wrote.
For anyone who thinks the media can be trusted, the results are shocking.
In the KCPQ video, Trump’s skin is a very orange tone. Additionally, the video is zoomed in on him, to make his head appear large.
Also, in the raw footage, the president licks his lips once while speaking, probably to moisten them before immediately going on. In the KCPQ video, that action appears to be “looped,” so Trump is shown licking his lips repeatedly, which looks a bit disturbing and creepy.
Herman wrote that KCPQ had issued a statement saying it was looking into the matter and acknowledging the incident does not meet the station’s “editorial standards.”
“We are investigating this to determine what happened. This does not meet our editorial standards and we regret if it is seen as portraying the President in a negative light. The editor responsible for editing the footage is being placed on leave while we investigate further.”
This kind of apparent breach of public trust is something the media as a whole can ill afford.
Public trust is already low. As much as the media likes to blame Trump for that, there are too many instances of “fake news” to ignore the fact that they are doing it to themselves.
A 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media and Democracy showed that the public does not believe the media is fulfilling their duty to report in an unbiased and informative manner.
The survey was conducted with input from 19,000 adults in the United States. Only half of those surveyed believed that there was enough information available for individuals to be able to sort through the bias to find the facts for themselves.
In addition, only 27 percent felt “very confident” in their own ability to do so. That means the remaining 73 percent questioned their own ability to find the truth in the abundance of biased reporting.
“Reporting” with bias is bad enough coming from a news station. But a blatant attempt to smear the sitting president of the United States with deceptive video editing would be wholly unethical.
The public deserves better and should demand it. News reporting is supposed to be just that. It is not supposed to be activism and character assassination.
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