Have you ever watched the news and seen a sound bite played where someone’s talking and then you stop hearing audio for a second or two and then the camera returns to the news anchor or the news anchor starts doing a voice over? TV News routinely wipes out the audio after the end of the segment it wants to highlight. In other instances the video just freezes…that’s another way of doing it. These are meant to be used as cues.

So the conclusion is obvious. These two clips were meant to be used separately on the air and not spliced together. But someone decided to put the two together for the web but did it quick and sloppy and didn’t trim off the “dead air” parts. So Michael Moore is right that FNC cut out the audio. But he’s wrong that it was done deliberately to make Obama look bad. The only thing FNC is guilty of is having a lazy video editor and a not at all alert web staff that allowed the clip to go online in that form. This whole controversy would have been avoided if people had just done their jobs properly. Case closed.