by John Nolte
Like Rathergate, Edit-Gate is a New Media-driven story pushed so hard (including here at the Bigs) that the mainstream media can no longer ignore it.
The result has been some action on the part of NBC News, but nowhere near enough. But hey, if NBC prefers death by a thousand paper cuts as opposed to biting the bullet and simply doing the right thing, that's fine by me.
At first NBC News thought they could make us go away by admitting the "error." The "error," of course, being the malicious, race-baiting edit of 911 audio in order to make a private citizen, who is currently in hiding for fear of his life, look racist.
Then NBC News thought an apology might end the growing firestorm.
Then, finally, just like a White House with something to hide about Fast and Furious, news was leaked late Friday that NBC had finally fired the producer responsible for this unpardonable act.
The Washington Post's Erik Wemple, who has been the mainstream media exception in doing a superb job of covering this scandal, put the news of last night's firing this way:
Yet it’s not sewn up. We still don’t know the name of the dismissed producer; we don’t know if the network gave any consideration to apologizing directly to Zimmerman; we don’t know if warnings were issued to other NBC employees; and so on.
NBC could have headed off this story sprawl by publishing a fuller account of the incident ealier [sic] this week. Since it failed to do so, this scandal will have a life well beyond Easter.Yes, that's right, just for starters, NBC News refuses to name the fired producer responsible.
And that, by any reasonable standard, is nothing more than a cover up.
To think that this biased, irresponsible, race-baiter can now freely move about the cabin and get a job anywhere in the news business, free from public scrutiny, is a cover up.
Moreover, if NBC won’t name the producer, how in the world are we supposed to know someone has actually been fired?
But the biggest problem for NBC News is that a single unnamed sacrificial scapegoat doesn't begin to pay for the deliberate crime of throwing gasoline on a racial fire that was already raging.
Edit-Gate didn’t occur in the fever swamps of MSNBC. This happened on the oh-so-storied "Today Show," which means that there are only two ways this was allowed to happen:
1. The checks and balances at the "Today Show" are so lax that one person can push something like this on the air without anyone noticing -- at least until New Media smells a rat.
2. There are checks and balances, but this was ALLOWED to go through purely for the partisan political purpose of aiding and abetting Obama's push to gin up his base in a crucial swing state.
Not only do we need to know HOW a scandal that makes Rathergate look like just another piece of biased reporting was allowed to happen; we also need to know WHO allowed it to happen.
It doesn't matter if the answer to the above question is one, two, or all of the above. Either someone who needs to be fired put a wildly irresponsible system in place, or a whole bunch of people who need to be fired allowed this travesty to skim through.
Either way, more people need to be fired, most especially the person who sits at the desk where the NBC buck ultimately stops.
With their Friday night "nameless producer" dump, NBC News has only disgraced itself more, and still the network insists that the malicious edit was an "error" and not done deliberately, which of course is absolute nonsense.
This intentional attempt to gin up racial hatred and division is not only the slander of a private citizen (and the poisoning of a jury he might someday meet) but an attack on every citizen of this country -- and we deserve more than a nameless sacrificial scapegoat.
NBC News should immediately remove itself from this investigation and appoint a neutral panel to not only fully investigate the matter, but to reveal their findings to the public and ensure accountability is meted out to all those responsible.
If NBC and the "Today Show" are at all interested in rebuilding anything resembling a reputation, this is the only acceptable first step in what will be a very long journey.
P.S. Don’t think for a second we've forgotten about you, CNN, ABC, and New York Times. You're all part of Edit-Gate, and there will be a reckoning.
Big Journalism
