But at least I understand where Soechtig and Couric are coming from. They have a film to promote and probably figure, correctly, that the anger and criticism of gun owners—and of believers in, you know, accuracy, fact-checking, and fair play—won’t damage that film’s chances nor their careers.
The behavior of the New York Times, on the other hand, just baffles me. When the Free Beacon story broke, Gutowski took a call from Katie Rogers, a reporter for the Times who follows social media. Rogers wanted to know a little bit more about the story. That’s fine, I guess, even though all of the pertinent information is available on our site for free. There’s not really much to this story, in all honesty. There’s the interview as portrayed in the film and the interview as it actually happened, and both of these things are accessible on The Washington Free Beacon. If the Huffington Post had exposed the deceptive editing of a pro-gun film, I doubt the New York Times would phone Ryan Grim asking about his sources. Most of the time a news story is about what’s being reported on, not who’s doing the reporting.
Except of course when it’s the Washington Free Beacon doing the reporting. “Audio of Katie Couric Interview Shows Editing Slant in Gun Documentary, Site Claims,” read the headline on Katie Rogers’s piece. By using the word “claims” instead of “reports,” a self-evident fact—that the raw audio differs from the finished film—becomes a “She said, the Free Beacon said” exploration of the nature of truth in our postmodern world. “A conservative news site posted what it said was audio proof that filmmakers behind a documentary about the gun control debate deliberately edited video to portray gun-rights activists as unable to answer questions about background checks,” the story begins. That’s one way of looking at it. Is the clip really “audio proof,” though, or is that just what this “conservative news site” says it is?
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