They Did It Again! CNN Caught Radically Editing Trump Clip To Make Him Look a Liar
CNN apparently gets very offended when you call it “fake news” or “very fake news,” especially in the context of the Trump administration. This is somewhat humorous, since the network gives you plenty of opportunities to do it.
The latest instance of Donald Trump-related perfidy out of the CNN newsroom came after the president’s reinstated ban on most transgender troops in the military was upheld by the Supreme Court.
“Promises made, promises kept?” Jessica Dean said at the beginning of a pre-recorded segment just after the decision. “Candidate Donald Trump was quick to promise his advocacy for the LGBTQ community.”
Then it cut to a clip of Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention: “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.”
Then, as Newsbusters pointed out, there was a very obvious jump cut before he said: “Believe me.”
That probably should have tipped you off to the fact that it wasn’t the actual quote. In fact, it was selectively edited to make the president look like a liar:
Very little context was given, so let’s provide it: The convention happened in the wake of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people inside the gay nightclub were killed by a radicalized Muslim.
The shooting had happened 10 days prior, and it was exceptionally clear that the motivation of the killer was terroristic in nature. Thus, the full quote from Trump was, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful, foreign ideology. Believe me.”
Nothing in that quote said he would protect the right of transgender individuals to serve in the military at all costs. What he said was that he would keep them safe from people who sought to kill them simply because they were LGBTQ.
That didn’t come up during the segment on CNN’s “The Lead,” where host Jake Tapper talked to Dean about the quote.
“You might recall that during the 2016 presidential campaign, LGBTQ allies of then-candidate Donald Trump pledged that Trump would be great for their community,” Tapper said, mentioning the fact that Caitlyn Jenner was impressed Trump had let him use the women’s bathroom at Trump Tower.
“So, two years into the Trump presidency, with measure after measure suggesting administration hostility to LGBTQ equality, how are those allies explaining today what the president is doing?” he continued.
“The president even used the term ‘LGBTQ’ at the Republican Convention — the first time a nominee ever did that — but I guess actions speak louder than those five letters,” Tapper said.
I don’t necessarily feel the need to go into the decision made by the Trump White House or the Supreme Court, other than to note that the segment didn’t even acknowledge the merest possibility of operational issues brought up by transgender members of the armed forces.
However, CNN feigns outrage at the fact that the president is antagonistic toward the media and specifically toward CNN. It stamps its feet every time the two-word construction “fake news” is uttered, as if the media were a kind of secular religion that politicians dare not utter bigotry against.
Yet, the entirety of this segment was based around a quote that was made in a very specific context regarding terrorism and truncated to imply that Donald Trump would continue to let transgender troops serve in the military. That’s profoundly unethical — and yet profoundly unsurprising.
And, as Newsbusters noted, even when MSNBC ran virtually the same segment back in October, it at least had the dignity to leave the full quote in:
If you’re going to use a contextual ellipsis when it comes to video editing, the only ethical reason to do it is because you’re omitting something that is extraneous to the footage. In this case, it’s pretty much the antithesis of extraneous.
This is so beyond unethical that it almost demands an apology and retraction — two things I can almost be sure won’t be coming from either Tapper or Dean.
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