Couric: On second thought, I can see why that highly deceptive edit in our gun-control movie might be misleading

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Allah:

Last week, when gun-rights advocates first cried foul, she sniffed that she was “very proud” of the film. Now, in a statement posted this morning, she’s claiming the edit bothered her too the first time she watched it. What happened?

Here’s a safe bet. So long as it was only activists on the right who were criticizing her, Couric and her team could shrug it off and refuse to address the edit. They’ll wear the attacks from “gun nuts” like a badge of honor, no matter how meritorious they are; it’s good PR for a movie about gun control. Once “respectable” media echoed the criticism, though, it risked undermining the moral authority of the film, which is the whole point of gun-control propaganda. A critique of the media-political class from the right isn’t credible until someone from the class itself validates it. The same dynamic explains why the New York Times’s storylast week about the controversy ran under the headline, “Audio of Katie Couric Interview Shows Editing Slant in Gun Documentary, Site Claims.” There was no need for that last bit. The Times could have checked the work of Stephen Gutowski and the Washington Free Beacon in five minutes and declared as a matter of plain fact that the footage had been edited deceptively. They felt obliged to hedge by noting that this is merely what the Free Beacon “claims” only because the Beacon is a right-wing site and thus is presumed untrustworthy until someone not of the right has vouched for it.

As Executive Producer of “Under the Gun,” a documentary film that explores the epidemic of gun violence, I take responsibility for a decision that misrepresented an exchange I had with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL). My question to the VCDL regarding the ability of convicted felons and those on the terror watch list to legally obtain a gun, was followed by an extended pause, making the participants appear to be speechless.

When I screened an early version of the film with the director, Stephanie Soechtig, I questioned her and the editor about the pause and was told that a “beat” was added for, as she described it, “dramatic effect,” to give the audience a moment to consider the question. When VCDL members recently pointed out that they had in fact immediately answered this question, I went back and reviewed it and agree that those eight seconds do not accurately represent their response.

VCDL members have a right for their answers to be shared and so we have posted a transcript of their responses here. I regret that those eight seconds were misleading and that I did not raise my initial concerns more vigorously.

“Dramatic effect,” huh? I didn’t realize it until I read this Examiner post but it turns out other Couric productions have also allegedly used creative editing to falsely suggest that Katie stumped an interviewee who was on the wrong side of an issue. From an account of Couric’s 2004 production “Fed Up”:

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Another graduate of the Dan Rather school of Journalism

Calling Katie a journalist is highly deceptive.

This is how liberals look smart and as if the won an argument with someone holding a superior position; edit their responses so they APPEAR to be overwhelmed by liberal logic. That is the ONLY way it works.

Meanwhile, when faced with damning video of a liberal institution, claim THAT is edited… as if deceptive editing would be a bad thing.

Nobody will see through THAT.

Couric has a long history of “creative editing.” Her creative edit of her interview with Sarah Palin was the first one I took notice of. The leftist press simply can’t resist altering video and audio to deceive the public..

This just in: Katie Couric’s Anti-Gun Producers Repeatedly Violated Federal Gun Laws

But that’s not the worst thing that happened with the making of this documentary. It turns out that Couric’s production team deliberately conspired to violate federal gun laws. According to video obtained by Ammoland, a shooting sports news website, one of Couric’s producers deliberately committed at least four separate felonies by purchasing four separate firearms across state lines without a background check.

In the video, Soechtig openly admits that she directed one of her employees to purchase guns across state lines, and that he absolutely followed her orders

(Snip)

…according to Soechtig’s very own testimony. According to Soechtig, she gave direct orders to an employee of hers who lives in Colorado to buy some guns in Arizona without undergoing a federal background check. He then acted on those orders, and, according to Soechtig’s own admission, proceeded to illegally purchase four separate firearms from a seller in Arizona. And if he was purchasing the guns for Soechtig rather than himself, you can add illegal straw purchases to the list of federal crimes.

Soechtig’s employee, acting on her orders, repeatedly violated federal gun laws. And he did so not just because of his own monumental ignorance, but because of the aggressive ignorance of Stephanie Soechtig, Katie Couric’s hand-picked producer, director, and writer of the anti-gun documentary.

Soechtig’s chest-thumping ignorance and arrogance on display in that interview–“Legally. Like, this is legal.”–are a perfect example of why so many gun owners care so little about the opinions of sanctimonious gun controllers. Because they have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about. They don’t understand how guns work. They don’t understand crime statistics. They don’t know the difference between semi-automatic and automatic. And they can’t even deign to spend 5 minutes researching actual gun laws before declaring that those laws just aren’t sufficient.