CBS News is apparently taking editing tips from The Daily Show. In an interview with McCain, they aired Katie Couric asking McCain a question, then spliced in his answer from a previous question.
Actual: Couric quoting Barack Obama as saying that “there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?” McCain responds by accusing Obama of “a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.”
The trouble with this is that the Anbar Awakening began before the troop increase in Iraq. And, this error adds to the sense that McCain is using the Surge as a political crutch in much the same way as Giuliani was using 9/11 in that fashion. “Noun-verb-9/11” could become “Noun-verb-Surge.”
CBS aired version: Couric quoting Barack Obama as saying that “there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?” McCain: “Senator Obama has indicated by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.”
I’ve already voiced my opinion of McCain’s decision to essentially paint Obama as a traitor who puts his personal ambition above the good of the country even in matters of war and death. But CBS’s editing decision is not McCain’s fault – taking for granted, I guess, that no one from the McCain campaign requested the change. I think we all take for granted that full interviews are not generally aired and that we have to be aware that news organizations may well be cherry picking bits of the interview in ways that don’t accurately capture the tone of the entire interview. But mixing questions and responses seems to go well beyond legitimate editing. Just my opinion.
As for McCain, this week his campaign has been in, as John Cole puts it, gaffe-o-matic mode. There’s the business with the faulty Anbar Awakening chronology. More embarrassingly, there was the matter of McCain citing troubles on the Iraq-Pakistan border. (Otherwise known as “Iran” per The Daily Show.) And, somewhere lower down on the gaffe scale were several references to Czechoslovakia which has been out of existence for the past 15 years.
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