This was the hot topic on my Twitter feed just as I was falling asleep last night, but today is a new day:
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Wednesday night shared a video of CNN reporter Jim Acosta that appeared to have been altered to make his actions at a news conference look more aggressive toward a White House intern.
The edited video looks authentic: Acosta appeared to swiftly chop down on the arm of an aide as he held onto a microphone while questioning President Trump. But in the original video, Acosta’s arm appears to move only as a response to a tussle for the microphone. His statement, “Pardon me, ma’am,” is not included in the video Sanders shared. Critics said that video — which sped up the movement of Acosta’s arms in a way that dramatically changed the journalist’s response — was deceptively edited to score political points. That edited video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, known for his conspiracy-theory videos on the far-right website Infowars.
Watson said he did not change the speed of the video and that claims he had altered it were a “brazen lie.” But side-by-side comparisons support claims from fact-checkers and experts such as Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, who argued that crucial parts of the video appear to have been speeded up or altered so as to distort the action.
Acosta was refusing to give up the mic because he wanted to ask a followup question, and you can decide for yourself if that demonstrates bad manners. But of course the White House couldn’t just stop there. Sarah Huckabee Sanders revoked Acosta’s press pass, saying they would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern”—a nasty implication that’s plainly untrue. Then she posted the doctored video:
We stand by our decision to revoke this individual’s hard pass. We will not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video. pic.twitter.com/T8X1Ng912y
— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) November 8, 2018
Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
The intern’s reach for the mic is slowed down, and the “chop” motion is accelerated. Here’s an annotated side by side comparison: pic.twitter.com/wLCG5GVdo1
— Aymann Ismail (@aymanndotcom) November 8, 2018
It’s subtle, but it does indeed appear to be doctored to make Acosta’s action look more like a deliberate “karate chop.” I wonder how this is being handled over at Fox News? I don’t have the foritude to turn on the TV and find out.
