An editor at a Seattle Fox affiliate was fired today after he was found to have doctored a portion of President Trump’s border speech which aired on the station. From My Northwest:

A listener to my program sent me a video that appears to show a deceptively edited video of President Trump’s speech from the Oval Office. We performed a side-by-side comparison of the video from our listener, apparently taken by a smart phone recording of Q13, to the raw video of Trump’s speech from CNN.

That comparison revealed the Q13 video creating a loop of the President licking his lips — making it seem bizarre and unbalanced — it also seems that someone distorted the President’s face and may have added an orange tone to his skin.

The coloration in the clip below is immediately obvious. Near the end, you’ll see the video has been slowed and reversed so Trump appears to be playing with his tongue. The irony is that this comes just as Trump is saying, “Hopefully, we can rise above partisan politics in order to support national security.” Obviously, this editor could not do that.

This is the sort of thing you expect from some of the left-wing hosts of late night talk shows but this person obviously doesn’t belong at a news station. The Seattle Times reports he was fired after an internal review:

“This does not meet our editorial standards and we regret if it is seen as portraying the president in a negative light,” Q13 news director Erica Hill wrote in an emailed statement early Thursday.

Later Thursday morning, Hill released another statement saying, “We’ve completed our investigation into this incident and determined that the actions were the result of an individual editor whose employment has been terminated.”

It does seem a little odd that no one at the station was aware of this until someone raised the issue. The edit to the video goes by fairly quickly so I could see someone missing it, but was there no one who thought it strange that Trump was bright orange? It makes me wonder if other people at the station were in on the joke or tacitly allowing it.

Finally, just yesterday I wrote about the push on the left to stop giving Trump live airtime on television. Instead, some are arguing that Trump’s speeches and press availabilities should be aired on a delay (if at all) so they can be properly contextualized. Needless to say, this clip took some time to edit and the Seattle Times says it was “shown later on Q13.” Granted, it’s an extreme example of what can go wrong when the media decides to place itself between the president and the people. Not everyone is going to give in to partisan anger as this editor did, but some will. It may not be visual, it could just be by leaving his best lines or strongest points on the cutting room floor. But consider the bright orange skin tone on the right a symbol for the kind of biased filtering the media wants all of Trump’s statements to pass through. I don’t think the media deserves that sort of power. It only seems to invite more partisan misbehavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZLs11uSg-A