One "big warning flag" Tompkins saw in the shorter tape was the way it made it appear that Schiller had laughed and commented "really, that's what they said?" after being told that the fake Muslim group advocates for sharia law. In fact, the longer tape shows that Schiller made that comment during an "innocuous exchange" that had nothing to do with the supposed group's position on sharia law, David reports.
No! Really?!
Tompkins also says that O'Keefe's edited tape ignores the fact that Schiller said "six times ... over and over and over again" that donors cannot buy the kind of coverage they want on NPR.
Yes but we said that Ron Schiller was not involved in NPR’s news division in any way. So we already knew the entire pretext of the tape (“NPR people have opinions! Those opinions mean their news coverage is biased!”) was bullshit.
More from Morning Edition’s report:
Take the political remarks. Ron Schiller speaks of growing up as a Republican and admiring the party's fiscal conservatism. He says Republican politicians and evangelicals are becoming "fanatically" involved in people's lives.
But in the shorter tape, Schiller is also presented as saying the GOP has been "hijacked" by Tea Partiers and xenophobes.
In the longer tape, it's evident Schiller is not giving his own views but instead quoting two influential Republicans — one an ambassador, another a senior Republican donor. Schiller notably does not take issue with their conclusions — but they are not his own.
You don’t say! And finally:
In recent days, several influential journalists have written that they regret giving O'Keefe's NPR videos wider circulation without scrutinizing them for themselves, given his past record and some of the objections that the Blaze first raised. They include Ben Smith of Politico, James Poniewozik of Time magazine and Dave Weigel of Slate.
"The speed at which the media operates when a video comes out is a problem," Weigel said Sunday. "I mean, the rush to be the first to report on a video — and, let's be brutally honest, the rush is to get traffic and to get people booked on [cable TV] shows to talk about it — and that nature leads you to not do the rigor and fact-checking that you would do in other situations."
Ah well, mistakes were made! Just like with the war in Iraq, the media blames its “rush to be first” for its shoddy work and failure to be accurate. Deadlines, dammit they are such pesky little things! Bygones!
And they wonder why people don’t trust the media. Amazing! Nobody, certainly not Dave Weigel or Ben Smith or James Poniewozik, could have had any idea that James O’Keefe is a lying sack of shit with a partisan political agenda and a well-documented history of lies and distortions. Hoocoodanode?!
Furthermore, this incident proves what I said last month is still correct:
When the right wants to embarrass the left they must resort to severely edited videos doctored with the intention of misleading viewers, and which completely misrepresent actual events. When the left wants to embarrass the right they just need to capture the right speaking honestly.
Still holds true.
