When Chuck Todd (shown), host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked his panel on Sunday to view part of a conversation Attorney General William Barr had previously with CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, he said: “I want you to listen to this Bill Barr answer to a question about what history will say about [General Flynn’s exoneration]. Wait until you hear this answer. Take a listen.”
And then Todd played just part of Barr’s response, editing out the most important and revealing part. Said Barr: “Well, history is written by the winners. So, it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”
Todd then, without waiting for anyone’s response, jumped in:
I am struck … by the cynicism of the answer. It’s a correct answer. But he’s the attorney general. He didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this was a political job.
The missing part — the part that was deliberately and intentionally left out — was this. Barr continued:
But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision [to exonerate Flynn] because it upheld the rule of law.
On Sunday afternoon Department of Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec tweeted: “Very disappointed by the deceptive editing/commentary by Chuck Todd on Meet The Press on AG Barr’s CBS interview. Compare the two transcripts below. Not only did the AG make the case in the VERY answer Chuck says he didn’t, he also did so multiple times throughout the interview.”
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Six hours later Meet the Press tweeted:
You’re correct. Earlier today we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis. The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error.
David Marcus at The Federalist didn’t buy the explanation:
Todd, or one of his producers, saw the “history written by the winners” line and thought they had found an angle. But it is hard to conceive of a situation in which whoever pulled and created the clip did not also see the sentence [following] in which Barr defended his move to drop the case.
It is almost impossible to imagine that those words were cut for any reason other than to deceive viewers.
The president saw the deception and tweeted: “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd should be FIRED by “Comcast” (NBC) for this fraud. He knew exactly what was doing. Public Airwaves = Fake News!”
The Federalist summed up the epidemic of fake news that has all but replaced any semblance of fair, balanced, and objective reporting of the news:
It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.
Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.
Photo of Chuck Todd: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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