In a stunning fall-from-grace, the once respected Andrea Mitchell exposed the dark underbelly of left-wing journalism this week on the home of liberal media: MSNBC. The once acclaimed journalist allowed a doctored video to be reported as fact, effectively creating the news and perpetrating a lie because it complemented her personal political views.
Andrea Mitchell, the long-time NBC reporter/journalist played a selectively edited video clip on her show “Andrea Mitchell Reports” Monday on MSNBC of Mitt Romney discussing a visit to Wawa, a chain of convenience store/gas stations located in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Andrea Mitchell then discussed the fictitious recording with another MSNBC contributor and commented on Romney’s imaginary gaff.
“It’s amazing,” Romney said, to a Pennsylvania crowd. The clip then shows Romney saying, “You have a touchtone keypad, and you touch that, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your sandwich.”
What Andrea Mitchell’s clip didn’t show was nearly three minutes of Romney discussing the nightmare of paperwork faced by an optometrist trying to change his address. The Wawa comments were Romney expressing amazement at Wawa’s streamlined process to emphasize the efficiencies of the private sector versus government bureaucracy.
“We went to Wawa and it was instructive to me, because I saw the difference between the private sector and the governmental sector. People who work in government are good people and I respect what they do, but you see, the challenge with government is that it doesn’t have competition,” Romney said in a part that Mitchell’s team edited out of the segment.
Andrea Mitchell used the false narrative to reference the infamous stumble by George H.W. Bush, who supposedly marveled at a supermarket scanner at a grocers’ convention during his failed 1992 re-election campaign. The truth about that event was that Bush wasn’t impressed by grocery scanners, but rather a new state-of-the-art device that could read damaged bar codes; that story was falsely slanted by The New York Times and offered as evidence that Bush was out of touch with the rest of us.
When the full video clip of Romney was released by SooperMexican.com it quickly went viral after it became clear the video reported by Andrea Mitchell had been doctored.
Despite the widespread clamor generated by Andrea Mitchell and MSNBC’s falsehood the Romney campaign has remained mum.
When Andrea Mitchell’s Tuesday show began she addressed the criticism over the selective editing.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about a conversation you and I had yesterday,” Andrea Mitchell said to MSNBC contributor Chris Cillizza, “We ran clips of Mitt Romney in Cornwall, Pa., talking about his trip to a Wawa. The RNC and the campaign both reached out to us saying that Romney had more to say about that visit, about federal bureaucracy and innovation in the private sector.” Mitchell than ran the unedited clip from the rally.
NBC and MSNBC spokesperson Lauren Skowronski denied that any deceptive editing took place.
“MSNBC did not edit anything out of order or out of sequence and at no time did we intend to deceive our viewers.”
When you watch the full video it is clear that Romney isn’t amazed at Wawa’s technology but rather their ability to get things done orders of magnitude more efficiently than the government. Leaving out Romney’s words that portray the comparison between private businesses and the government gives a false impression of Romney’s words.
Just three months ago NBC was found to be editing audio of George Zimmerman‘s 911 call as he watched Trayvon Martin in the minutes before he fatally shot the Florida teen. On a tape edited and played on the NBC “Today” show, Zimmerman was heard calling Martin “suspicious” and volunteering that he was “black.” The full, unedited tape showed that Zimmerman only mentioned Martin’s race when asked by the dispatcher. The result made it sound like Zimmerman was racially profiling Martin. The network fired three people after getting widespread criticism.
How much more of these distortion of facts must we endure from the propagandists at NBC and MSNBC before they are labeled for what they are, the media arm of the Democratic Party? Shame on you Andrea Mitchell; you were once a much respected journalist, but now you’re just another phony liberal con artist.
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