In the space of a few months, one of the more straightforward journalistic tasks — editing tape for broadcast — has been behind a $16 million legal settlement, a network’s change in how it offers interviews on a news show and, now, the resignation of two top leaders at the BBC.
The other common denominator: President Donald Trump.
Britain’s BBC is reeling this week following the resignations of its director-general, Tim Davie, and news chief Deborah Turness amid accusations of bias in the editing of last year’s documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance.” The BBC admitted filmmakers spliced together quotes from different sections of the speech Trump made before the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol to make it seem like he was directly urging violence.
Trump sued CBS’ parent company over a “60 Minutes” edit of Kamala Harris’ interview, resulting in this summer’s settlement, and the complaints of his Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, about her “Face the Nation” interview in August caused a policy change.
In a different time, the BBC episode would likely have led to a quick admission of a mistake, a correction, apology and everyone would have moved on, said Mark Lukasiewicz, a former NBC News executive and now dean of Hofstra University’s School of Communication.
“But in an era where every editing decision taken in a newsroom is now under a microscope and can be weaponized for political purposes,” he said, “it’s got to be something that is causing real caution in newsrooms all over the world now.”
Editing decisions were once largely behind the scenes
Questioning edits is another tool for the president to strike back at journalists who displease him. He has restricted access by The Associated Press after its decision not to follow his lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, sued outlets like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and stripped funding for public broadcasting because he doesn’t like its news coverage.
Much like print reporters who search through notebooks for the perfect quote, video editors often labor to identify footage that will advance a story.
Sometimes the perfect image does not exist, or a quote isn’t as succinct or sharp as a medium under constant time constraints demands. That can lead to the temptation to rearrange or even manipulate.
NBC News got in trouble more than a decade ago for a story about George Zimmerman — who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a young man who was in his Florida gated community. It quoted Zimmerman talking to a police dispatcher about Martin, saying “this guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks Black.”
In reality, Zimmerman’s description of Martin’s activities last longer, and his speculation about Martin’s race was a direct response to a police dispatcher’s question about it. Zimmerman sued NBC News for libel, a case later thrown out by a judge. NBC apologized to its viewers.
Katie Couric apologized in 2016 when an editor for her “Under the Gun” documentary inserted an eight-second pause after footage of Couric questioning guns right activists about background checks. The activists actually responded right away.
Quotes artificially compressed in BBC documentary
In the BBC edit, different parts of Trump’s 2021 Capitol speech are edited to appear as a single quote: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
But the second two sentences of that quote were actually said nearly an hour later than the first sentence, and part of his speech where he said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully was omitted.
In an interview that aired Tuesday on Fox News, Trump said, “I guess I have to” sue the BBC. “Because I think they defrauded the public and they’ve admitted it.”
In teaching video editing to students at Syracuse University, Jamie Hoskins said she repeatedly emphasizes the need not to be misleading. She’s a former news producer who worked in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Buffalo, New York.
“I talk about that in every class at every level,” she said. “You don’t want to mischaracterize what people are saying or change their meaning by piecing things together.”
The proliferation of video — ever shorter, ever snappier — on TikTok and Instagram adds to pressure placed on journalists. The ability of AI to manufacture completely false video is yet another complication. Fake, racist video of Black food assistance recipients complaining about missing benefits due to the government shutdown spread online; a Fox News digital story linked to some of the videos earlier this month and had to be corrected.
“We live in a world now where people can get content from everywhere,” Hoskins said. “There is a difference between content and journalism.”
A new way to protect against complaints
At the root of Trump’s complaint about “60 Minutes” was an exchange between correspondent Bill Whitaker and Kamala Harris, the president’s opponent in last year’s election. CBS aired two different reports — on “60 Minutes” and “Face the Nation” — depicting Harris giving two different answers to a Whitaker question about the war in the Mideast.
CBS News said both responses were part of Harris’ long-winded answer to the same question. But to people who saw both broadcasts, the effect was jarring; other news outlets say they have a strict policy, when they show an interviewer posing a question, that the immediate, direct response is aired.
CBS News defended it as routine editing. But it gave Trump an opening to charge that it was done to benefit Harris’ campaign.
“I don’t think the practices and standards are worse today than they were a few years ago,” Lukasiewicz said. “I think the consequences of mistakes are more serious than perhaps they used to be,” he said, because of the ability and willingness of politicians to seize on them.
In Noem’s pretaped talk with “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan this summer, the Homeland Security secretary complained CBS News had “shamefully edited the interview to whitewash the truth.” The network had shortened the interview, removing some accusations Noem had made about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant deported by the Trump administration.
In response, the network said that it would only air interviews on “Face the Nation” that were conducted live or, if taped in advance, would have to air in full.
More often, networks are defusing potential editing controversies by posting online full, unedited transcripts of key interviews, Lukasiewicz said. CBS News did that immediately when it aired a pre-taped edited interview with Trump on Nov. 2, along with video. The network didn’t release a transcript of its Harris interview for more than three months — not until Trump had sued and the FCC launched an investigation of the news division.
The Trump transcript release created its own issues, with dozens of amateur editors comparing the transcript to the shorter, edited interview that aired on “60 Minutes” to see what producers had decided to leave out.
This time, though, Trump had no complaints.
