The media is on a witch hunt. I'm so sick of these smear tactics by the mainstream media on Palin. Stupid New York Times then NBC now ABC. Whats going on?

Now before we all jump on the "bias" bandwagon, can I, as a representative of the overworked, underpaid and unappreciated television workers say something?

Any interview that is compared to it's full transcript will look like that. It is not just common, it is the rule of television The problem (normally) does not fall into the bias category, it is a far simpler issue; time.

An average interview lasts anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours (in this case, I would guess 30 - 45 minutes), where the interviewer will ask several questions. Upon completion of the interview, the tape is handed to an editor who has not slept in 3 days and is on his 32nd can of Red Bull (trust me on this, we don't sleep until something is rendering, no exceptions), he will be told that he needs to take this hour of footage, and make it 10 minutes, or whatever the time frame will be. The editor will pray to whatever god he supports that the deadline will be next month, as he has well over a dozen projects he is juggling, all due within the same 48 hour period, but editor gods are fickle, and the interview will need to be finished tomorrow (always tomorrow...).

The editor will then take out the easy parts: small talk, blown lines, questions that don't matter; which will normally kill about half of the interview. He will then start to trim individual responses, which is where the real problems start.

You see, a good interviewee will keep his responses short and concise, which is easy to edit down into sound bytes, editors love these people.

There are about 4 of them in the whole world.

Most people, when interviewed, tend to elaborate well after their point is made, giving a paragraph, where a sentence is needed. When editing, we listen to their answer, and try to infer what, if any, the point they are trying to make is; then we take every thing else and throw it away. Hopefully, that is enough to trim it down to 10 minutes.

It never is.

Once the medium cuts are made, the evil cuts rear their ugly head. These are the ones that make people yell and scream. Sometimes, we have to make them say what we feel they mean by fudging around with sequencing. It is the red headed stepchild of television editing, make no mistake, but it happens all the time. Is it a bias issue? Not normally, no. The problem is that we, as editors, don't have a lot of time to listen to the interview over and over again to get a strong idea of who a person is, and what, aside from what they say, they stand for. We have a day to do the work of a week, so we rush. We hate it just as much as you do, trust me.

Reading this, I really don't get the malicious vibe, as there are a lot of cuts I would have made myself (a few I wouldn't have, but then again I am not under pressure to finish this, so I have the luxury of thought), this reeks of an editor trying his damnedest to get what he felt was the general idea of what she was saying out, and getting it to fit in a nice time slot...

Sure it sucks that someone's ideas have to go through a few middle men to get to you, but let's be honest here, does anyone still hold televised news to any real regard anymore? Honestly? This stuff happens all the time, 90% of it is honest trimming, the rest is a little shadier (Mr. Simpson, what are you doing? Stay back!). Never take a TV interview at face value, always look for a full transcript (they are almost always available somewhere, if you look hard enough)

That was a lot longer than I thought it would be...

This election is turning out to be just about Palin. I think it's good for the Republicans.
The Mass Media has chosen it's candidate and will attack Palin and McCain.

Washington Post had over a page article this past week about mcCain's wife's addiction to pain killers in the mid or early 80s.

It wasn't a secret because she admitted her wrong long time ago.

I think Palin is doing a good job. I'm liking her more and more.

@mrjuju,

I think it's a fair assessment to say we can't be certain this was bias. But given the reaction I've seen I think it's pretty conclusive that the edits were poorly handled regardless of the reasoning for them or lack thereof.

I'm no editor but I'm pretty sure when the subject of an interview expresses the same point multiple times and its a fundamental point that the subject and the audience both have a substantial interest in communicating you would tend to leave that one in, no? Things like "I hate war" and "we need to avoid another cold war" being cut while more aggressive hard line comments are left in seems, at the very least, a bit dubious, wouldn't you agree? I don't need to be an editor to know that such things being edited out significantly changes the impact of the interview and the impression viewers are left with.

Regardless of the circumstances it was edited in or the motivations behind any given edit, it was botched terribly in at least two instances, both of which were on foreign policy issues which were the most critical issues that people were looking at...call it a coincidence if you like, I can't prove otherwise, but for the folks downwind of the media in everydayville, we've caught a whiff of something that just doesn't smell right.

Yea i know, i worked in broadcasting but, seriously what was the purpose behind editing McCains comment a few weeks back when katie couric got the shit storm over that one missing line. 1 line, seriously, they cut that for time did they?

Huffington Post -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/22/mccain-gets-history-of-th_n_114419.html

During a CBS interview on Tuesday, John McCain made a stone cold error on a subject about which he claims expert knowledge: the "surge" strategy in Iraq. In an interview with anchor Katie Couric, the Arizona Republican said, inaccurately, that the surge strategy was responsible for the much-touted "Anbar Awakening," in which Sunni sheiks turned against Al Qaeda, helping in turn to reduce violence in the country.

From the transcript:

Katie Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?

McCain: I don't know how you respond to something that is as-- such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.

In fact, as Spencer Ackerman and Ilan Goldenberg have reported, the record firmly establishes the opposite: instead of being caused by the surge, the key signs of the Anbar Awakening occurred not only before that strategy was implemented, but before it was ever conceived.

Yet McCain's error was not seen by any CBS Evening News viewers. As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted (video below), "CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric's question, but in response, it aired part of McCain's answer to the other question instead." (Ironically, this edit came on the same day that McCain's campaign released a video mocking the media's "love affair" with Obama.)

The fact remains, however, that the military official cited by McCain, then-Colonel Sean MacFarland, described the Anbar Awakening in September 2006 -- four months before the "surge" was even announced -- noting that tribal leaders were "stepping forward and cooperating with the Iraqi security forces against Al Qaeda." Moreover, a military review written by MacFarland notes that his unit actually left Anbar before most of the surge troops arrived; his success in the region came between June 2006 and February 2007.

Especially notable is that McCain himself was not always confused as to the start date of the Awakening, and whether or not it was caused by the surge. Fresh off one of his much-touted trips to Iraq, McCain delivered remarks to the conservative American Enterprise Institute on January 5, 2007. Alongside fellow Senator Joe Lieberman, McCain specifically advocated for the newly proposed surge, and cited the already-in-progress turning of Sunni sheiks as a reason to send more troops. From the transcript of the event:

"Too often the light at the tunnel has turned out to be a train, but I really believe -- I really believe that there's a strong possibility that you may see a very substantial change in Anbar province due to this new changes in our relationships with the sheiks in the region. ... But it's important, as I said in my opening remarks, that this troop surge be significant and sustained. Otherwise, don't do it."

@Sqrl: Yeah, the war stuff was why I threw in the "cuts I wouldn't have made" part, and honestly the only reason I have any doubts about the honesty of the edit. The rest of the interview if fairly tame in terms of lost information, so my gut tells me it was just a very poor choice by an editor, who probably thought her point had been made already. Although, I won't deny the possibility of a honest-to-god "Make this woman look bad" moment, they do happen from time to time.

@Megaman: Wow, that one was bad, and without a doubt falls into the 10% of shady editing out there. But it only reinforces my comment that people should find the transcripts of interviews, rather than relying on the 10 minute clip of it on Good Morning America or 60 Minutes or what have you.

Having read the full transcript, I don't feel reassured by the bolded parts. If anything, they show a candidate regurgitating crammed buzz words, unable to string any two of them together into a complete thought. If anything, ABC did her a favor by editing out all this hemming and hawing.

I've put more thought into this and there's one thing that really bothers me:

Right now, Sarah Palin is the most popular woman in the country. This was her first public interview. Think about that for a moment. People are rabid to get any and all info they can on her.

Why was this interview edited AT ALL?

The edit either involves partisan mischief or gross incompetence by ABC. Take your pick. You get an interview with a woman as wildly popular as Palin, you don't edit it down for time constraints. You turn it into a feature piece.

Eh, may be talk radio is right and the media is liberally biased. I personally think it is, but it's EXTREMELY hard to tell. I would have liked to hear the full interview though.

...

Does anyone else get the feeling that McCain is going to get 51%, then get eleceted, and then soon die, leaving Palin in charge? Even before Palin was nominated, I have though that he won't last in office...

Yeah it shouldn't have been edited at all.

I think on the editor's part, it was due to time constraints, but I bet somebody else in charge got that tape and was very happy with the change in tone.  I would've made some of the same edits, since both Gibson and Palin were repeating themselves, and I think some of the edits were good for Palin and some were bad for Palin.

Very sloppy editing, but not as bad as the editing of McCain's answer.

I almost always prefer to read interviews.