NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend demonstrated exactly why “alternative facts” are a requirement when we’re relying on the national media to tell us what’s happening.
The show’s Twitter account admitted on Sunday that it had failed to offer the full context of recent remarks by Attorney General William Barr when it aired them on that day’s program.
“Earlier today, we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis,” the show said. “The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error.”
That’s big of Meet the Press, but the admission came only after the Justice Department called attention to the problem.
NBC wasn’t even the only one to get this wrong.
Barr had been asked in an interview on Thursday about how history would view his decision to drop the Justice Department’s prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was special counsel Robert Mueller’s most high-profile scalp in the Russia investigation.
“Well, history is written by the winner,” said Barr. “So it largely depends on who’s writing the history. But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it held the rule of law. It helped — it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.”
The only part of that answer aired by NBC was: “Well, history’s written by the winners. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”
After the clip, an indignant Chuck Todd decried the “cynicism of the answer” and smacked Barr for not having made “the case that he was upholding the rule of law” even though that was expressly what Barr had done in his full answer.
But the New York Times had also chopped up the quote in an editorial to give the same impression that Todd had.
So did the popular left-leaning website Vox.
This is why we need alternative facts. Because the national media are incapable of giving us all of them.
