BUT WHERE IS INTELLECTUAL HONESTY?
by Joseph DeMaio, ©2012
(Apr. 9, 2012) — The NBC Editgate scandal continues to metastasize. Now, in reaction to the anemic response by NBC to the editing of the Zimmerman 911 emergency call, Steve Capus, president of NBC News, claims that the editing of the tape was an inadvertent “mistake” driven by exigent circumstances and not one intended to mislead or paint George Zimmerman in a racist light.
After its “internal investigation,” the source of the “error” was deemed to be the press of time occasioned by the fact that the audio was to be aired on the NBC morning “Today” show. Mr. Capus contended the investigation revealed that the responsible person “had cut the video clip down to meet a maximum time requirement for the length of the segment – a common pressure in morning television – and inadvertently edited the call in a way that proved misleading.” If this was an “inadvertent error,” why did an NBC producer get fired? As noted here, the Capus explanation doesn’t wash.
First, the folks at Breitbart point out that msnbc.com and NBC both reported “two weeks ago” the incident in a posting that included the ellipsis. However, if today one goes to the link provided in the prior Breitbart post to track back to the original msnbc.com posting, guess what: the ellipsis has disappeared. The original msnbc.com post has been “scrubbed” of the ellipsis. To quote a flood damage clean-up company’s slogan: “It’s like it never happened.”
In place of the ellipsis is the accurate recitation of the discussion between Zimmerman and the 911 dispatcher. It will be interesting to see whether the Breitbart folks follow up on the captured and preserved “screen shot” of the prior msnbc.com posting which included the ellipsis and available (for the moment) here.
The concept of scrubbing a website to square the facts with revisionist history first originated as a fictional mechanism employed by the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” There, the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, would dump inconvenient historical facts down the “memory hole” so that history became retroactively and seemingly aligned with contemporary dogma. With “Editgate,” NBC has elevated the use of the memory hole to an art form.
Second, the “time crunch” explanation by Capus just doesn’t ring true. In a matter of this significance (at least in the eyes and minds of the propagandists at NBC), a “time crunch” of 6 seconds — the length of time to mutter the excised words at issue — is meaningless. A news anchor can barely clear his throat in 6 seconds, so who, exactly, does Capus think he is kidding? Perhaps he is trying to mollify Zimmerman’s lawyers, who may well be busily drafting their libel complaint.
Third, however, and of greater significance to readers at The Post & Email, even if people are willing to buy into the feeble explanation offered up by Mr. Capus, what possible explanation might be yet forthcoming from the Congressional Research Service or Jack Maskell or anyone else for the still existing ellipsis omission alteration of the Supreme Court’s decision in Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325 (1939) as discussed here?
Certainly no excuse could be founded on a “time crunch” or “word limit” restriction. Moreover, six months after the ellipsis deception edit was pointed out in May 2011 here at The Post & Email, the Congressional Research Service and Mr. Maskell repeated the deception in their November 14, 2011 report, reiterating that Mr. Obama was, purportedly, a “natural born citizen.”
In the absence of a rational explanation for the deliberate, written ellipsis performed by Mr. Maskell or whoever was directing him, the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that only through the alteration of the Supreme Court’s words in Perkins v. Elg could the desired result — a conclusion that the Supreme Court has already deemed that persons like Mr. Obama are “natural born citizens” — be concocted. Sadly, that deception is being allowed to fester.
This is not democracy. This is incremental tyranny. It is “1984” and Big Brother on steroids. And whereas Orwell produced fiction, that which now unfolds in this nation is real.
So, to repeat my prior question: is anyone out there listening? Anyone at all?
Doug Casey wrote an excellent article (The Ascendance of Sociopaths in US Governance) discussing the fact that sociopaths are now in power.
“The reason [things go wrong on a grand scale] is that a certain class of people – sociopaths – are now fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual and psychological/spiritual fabric of the US.”
If you think along these lines, a lot of what you (Joseph) point out in this excellent article makes sense. Our challenge, of course, is to remove these miscreants from power.