“If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?”
In “Under the Gun,” her new documentary film on gun violence, Yahoo’s Katie Couric poses this reasonable question to a members of a gun rights organization known as the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
And in the movie, they seem to react with an awkward silence lasting eight seconds. They look clueless about how to answer the most basic and obvious inquiry. The viewer is led to conclude that these people not only hold indefensible views, but cannot even make an attempt to defend them.
Thanks to a complete audio recording, however, we know that this depiction is a lie. When asked the question about background checks, members of the group launched without hesitation into their answers.
One of them discussed due process rights. Another brought up the numerous laws that already limit gun ownership. A third talked about the practical problems of relying on law to prevent crime in advance, as opposed to punishing it after the fact. At no point was there a pause longer than a second.
Swift and reasonable answers were, however, not what Couric needed. To make her case for more gun regulation she decided to transition from journalism to falsification and propaganda. Instead of showing the interview question and answer as they actually happened, she edited in an eight-second clip of the group sitting silently and slightly uncomfortably waiting to be interviewed.
Couric clearly wanted to present her question as though she were Perry Mason at the climax of a courtroom drama coming up with a killer debating point that confounded all opposition witnesses. She wanted it to seem as though no reasonable person could disagree and to present the gun rights group as tacitly acknowledging it by staying silent and looking at their feet. Oh, Katie, you’re so clever, you foxed those foolish gun nuts!
If not for the audio recording, she would have gotten away with it, and the maligned subjects of this interview would be completely powerless to get out the truth.
What Couric has done is not bias or selective editing, nor even a manipulation. It is a complete substantive fabrication. She attempts to convince viewers that something happened when it didn’t. It is a crime against journalism.
Think back to the egregious 2004 case of Dan Rather’s bogus story about President Bush avoiding military service in Vietnam. It ended Rather’s career, but one can at least say in his defense that he believed in the fake documents he used as evidence. In contrast, neither Couric nor the video editors had any illusions about what they were doing. They witnessed the actual interview and chose to fool the viewer by substituting their own version.
When previous journalistic fabrications have been discovered — The New Republic’s Stephen Glass, The New York Times’ Jayson Blair and last week The Guardian’s Joseph Mayton, come to mind — news organizations have come clean as quickly as possible, offering sincere apologies to readers. Neither Couric nor Yahoo has apologized for their fraud. And Couric’s non-apology is actually worse than nothing at all, for it confirms that her fabrication was deliberate.
Normally, a news organization that discovers such a fabrication does more than apologize or fire the culprit. It follows up with an investigation of all of the perpetrator’s past work. In Couric’s case, there is at least one case that seems similar.
The movie “Fed Up” (2014) tells the story of how the historically unprecedented ubiquity of sugar in the American diet is causing an obesity epidemic, especially among children. Food companies, using lots of sugar in unlikely foods, come in for criticism. And so Couric interviews a dietary researcher who has had his work funded by food companies.
Professor David Allison of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is asked a tough question on camera. He is then shown asking for a moment to think, and then there’s a long and awkward pause where he acts a bit confused, like he doesn’t know what to say.
When the movie came out, Allison did not deny having taken some time to get his thoughts together, but he told Reason that he had indeed answered every question he’d been asked over the course of about an hour.
At the very least, this seems like a cheap shot. An investigation of the full-length footage seems appropriate to determine just how badly the interview was misrepresented, and whether there was anything more serious.
Couric, like Blair, Glass, and other fabricators, should not work in journalism again. Viewers implicitly trust those who work in television. They reckon they should be able to believe their eyes. But Couric is not worthy of their trust.
Perhaps she won’t face the consequences she deserves, but at least now everyone has fair warning not to trust the integrity of the interviews she does, or of those she has done previously.
