NBC News Accused of Editing 911 Call in Trayvon Martin Controversy
This is pretty heinous reporting, with NBC taking a page from Breitbart. Of course Fox & the other right wing outlets are all over this, because this time it’s not them running with a heavily edited tape that changes context and meaning.
So hang your head NBC, in your search for audience you’ve just lost more cred, and in news trust is almost everything.
NBC News is being excoriated in some circles - with competitor Fox News Channel leading the charge - for selectively editing audio of the 911 call placed by George Zimmerman just before he killed Trayvon Martin.
The NBC segment in question featured anchor Ron Allen and ran on the Today show on Tuesday. On Thursday, Sean Hannity and guest Brent Bozell played the NBC version of the 911 call and compared it with the unedited version.
In the NBC segment, Zimmerman says: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”
The full version, though, unfolds like this:
Zimmerman: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”
911 operator: “Okay. And this guy, is he white black or Hispanic?”
Zimmerman: “He looks black.”
The whole conversation however still does display Zimmerman’s xenophobic paranoia, and it really doesn’t need to be sensationalized by trying to make Zimmerman appear blatantly racist through editing.
“It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about” — something I do pretty much every day, rain or shine. My neighbors are used to me walking here, if I were in a strange neighborhood however, they wouldn’t recognize me, and if it were raining I would be wearing my hoodie up. I’d also be staring at the new houses that I hadn’t seen before.
A paranoid, narcissistic neighborhood busybody might assume I were up to no good - if an altercation followed however, it’s doubtful that the authorities would let that busybody get away with murder. Because I’m not a kid, because I’m not black.