The Media Research Center’s hate campaign against Kilmar Abrego Garcia merged with its war on CBS over purportedly misleadingly edited TV clips in an Aug. 31 post by Jorge Bonilla:
CBS News is once again at the center of a self-inflicted editorial practices firestorm, after excising significant portions of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s response to a question regarding “Maryland Dad” Kilmar Abrego García. CBS’s latest cooked interview left a recitation of the allegations against Abrego García on the cutting room floor.
[…]The excision of Noem’s recitation of Abrego García’s alleged misdeeds is the latest and most egregious in a long-running effort by the legacy media to make the American public believe the tale of “Maryland Dad” as a law-abiding asylum seeker. The deletion of Noem’s recitation of misdeeds from the broadcast version of this interview furthers this gaslighting of the American public (the full version is published on CBS’s website and on YouTube as of 9/1).
The record reflects that the sale of Paramount to SkyDance was held up over the resolution of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against CBS over their editing of the now-infamous 60 Minutes interview of Vice President Kamala Harris. And despite changes and departures at CBS News, it appears that not much has changed. The new boss is, for the time being, the same as the old boss.
Has CBS’s media bias ombudsman landed yet?
But Noem did not qualify her attack on Abrego Garcia as mere “allegations” — she flatly claimed that he is “a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors and even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off.” Further, even Bonilla admits that CBS posted the entire interview online, which undercuts his claim of a deliberate “excision.” As summarized by MSNBC’s Steve Benen:
For its part, CBS News explained that the interview was edited for time and that the full version, including the transcript, was published online, which doesn’t exactly sound like a cover-up.
But there’s another element to this worth keeping in mind: The comments in question, which Noem said but which were not immediately aired on television, were wrong. She peddled highly provocative allegations against Abrego Garcia and characterized them as factual, despite the fact that Trump administration prosecutors haven’t proven the claims and, more importantly, didn’t even include the claims in their indictment.
If the DHS secretary wants to argue that independent news organizations have a responsibility to air her false allegations, unedited, she’s welcome to give it a try. But I wouldn’t recommend it.
Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have cited previous identical smears by Noem as the basis for a motion to bar top Trump administration officials from speaking publicly about the case, violating his right to a fair trial. Given that, it could be argued that CBS did Noem a favor by editing out her unproven, inflammatory attacks.
Despite these inconvenient facts, the MRC had a Trump Regime Media narrative to push. Billl D’Agostino raged in a Sept. 2 post:
First, we ought to address this latest example of CBS’s nasty deceptive editing habit. While explaining her agency’s intention to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the notorious “Maryland man” (read: illegal alien from El Salvador), Noem rattled off some highlights from his colorful criminal past.
Yet when the interview actually aired on Face the Nation, that entire part of her answer had been inexplicably cut from the segment:
Tim Graham huffed in his podcast that day:
NewsBusters Associate Editor Nick Fondacaro and I were stunned by Sunday’s Face the Nationin which the show made a baffling decision to deceptively remove a key portion of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s answer about the alleged criminal record of illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Neither Graham nor D’Agostino mentioned that Noem offered no evidence to back up her claims, nor did she claim they were merely “alleged.”
A Sept. 5 post by Curtis Houck chortled the right-wing backlash over this has caused CBS to state that it “will now only broadcast live or live-to-tape” its interviews and will only be “subject to national security or legal restrictions,” further whining:
As our Bill D’Agostino wrote earlier this week, Noem’s answer about the alleged criminal record of Kilmar Abrego Garcia marked at least the fifth such headline-grabbing editing move by CBS News in the last four years.
In other words, why cut such a crucial answer for time and trust viewers to collectively visit their website or YouTube channel later in the day to view a guest’s full comments?
Again, Noem did not qualify her attack on Abrego Garcia as “alleged.” Why does the MRC insist on making that misleading claim?