NBC News Producers Have No Shame

According to the Washington Post, NBC News issued a muted apology yesterday for its troubling editing and omitting of key elements of the 911 conversation between George Zimmerman and a police dispatcher in the Trayvon Martin case.
After it became clear that NBC News producers aired a patchwork audio clip of the call that completely changed the meaning of the words used by Zimmerman in an effort to make him appear to be an unrepentant racist, NBC rather quietly announced late last week that it had launched an "internal investigation."
In the statement released yesterday by NBC we found a muted and completely incomplete apology for producer actions that can only be described as an effort to foment racial paranoia and widespread anger. The language used by NBC says it all, "During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers."
An error? It was as if the network merely acknowleged some sort of typographical mistake or that somehow the wrong audio mute button had been pressed accidentally by a low level staffer.

What actually happened is much more sinister. NBC News producers knowingly and willingly edited audio to provide a completely false version of a local shooting incident. In doing so it provided ratings grabbing raw material for its radicals on sister network MSNBC. The partisans at MSNBC wasted no time using that doctored audio to exploit racial divides to fire up the "base" and increase the potential number of political block votes cast for their favorites. They did so in a case in which the facts remained under investigation by law enforcement. In engaging this type of behavior, NBC producers demonstrated the most reprehensible approach to ethics imaginable. Is it any wonder that the Fox News Network has been flourishing for fifteen years? Chet Huntley and David Brinkley must be rolling over in their graves. In the meantime, news people of integrity, men like Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams seem to be whistling and kicking at the dirt, while their once respected network surrenders the last scrap of decency it ever had.

NBC News Producers Have No Shame