In the space of a few months, one of the more straightforward journalistic tasks — editing tape for broadcast — has been behind a $16 million legal settlement, a network’s change in how it offers interviews on a news show and, now, the resignation of two top leaders at the BBC.
The other common denominator: President Donald Trump.
Britain’s BBC is reeling this week following the resignations of its director-general, Tim Davie, and news chief Deborah Turness amid accusations of bias in the editing of last year’s documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance.” The BBC admitted filmmakers spliced together quotes from different sections of the speech Trump made before the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol to make it seem like he was directly urging violence.
Trump sued CBS’ parent company over a “60 Minutes” edit of Kamala Harris’ interview, resulting in this summer’s settlement, and the complaints of his Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, about her “Face the Nation” interview in August caused a policy change.
In a different time, the BBC episode would likely have led to a quick admission of a mistake, a correction, apology and everyone would have moved on, said Mark Lukasiewicz, a former NBC News executive and now dean of Hofstra University’s School of Communication.
“But in an era where every editing decision taken in a newsroom is now under a microscope and can be weaponized for political purposes,” he said, “it’s got to be something that is causing real caution in newsrooms all over the world now.”
Editing decisions were once largely behind the scenes
Questioning edits is another tool for the president to strike back at journalists who displease him. He has restricted access by The Associated Press after its decision not to follow his lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, sued outlets like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and stripped funding for public broadcasting because he doesn’t like its news coverage.
Much like print reporters who search through notebooks for the perfect quote, video editors often labor to identify footage that will advance a story.
Sometimes the perfect image does not exist, or a quote isn’t as succinct or sharp as a medium under constant time constraints demands. That can lead to the temptation to rearrange or even manipulate.
NBC News got in trouble more than a decade ago for a story about George Zimmerman — who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a young man who was in his Florida gated community. It quoted Zimmerman talking to a police dispatcher about Martin, saying “this guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks Black.”
In reality, Zimmerman’s description of Martin’s activities last longer, and his speculation about Martin’s race was a direct response to a police dispatcher’s question about it. Zimmerman sued NBC News for libel, a case later thrown out by a judge. NBC apologized to its viewers.
Katie Couric apologized in 2016 when an editor for her “Under the Gun” documentary inserted an eight-second pause after footage of Couric questioning guns right activists about background checks. The activists actually responded right away.
Quotes artificially compressed in BBC documentary
In the BBC edit, different parts of Trump’s 2021 Capitol speech are edited to appear as a single quote: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
But the second two sentences of that quote were actually said nearly an hour later than the first sentence, and part of his speech where he said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully was omitted.
In an interview that aired Tuesday on Fox News, Trump said, “I guess I have to” sue the BBC. “Because I think they defrauded the public and they’ve admitted it.”
In teaching video editing to students at Syracuse University, Jamie Hoskins said she repeatedly emphasizes the need not to be misleading. She’s a former news producer who worked in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Buffalo, New York.
“I talk about that in every class at every level,” she said. “You don’t want to mischaracterize what people are saying or change their meaning by piecing things together.”
The proliferation of video — ever shorter, ever snappier — on TikTok and Instagram adds to pressure placed on journalists. The ability of AI to manufacture completely false video is yet another complication. Fake, racist video of Black food assistance recipients complaining about missing benefits due to the government shutdown spread online; a Fox News digital story linked to some of the videos earlier this month and had to be corrected.
“We live in a world now where people can get content from everywhere,” Hoskins said. “There is a difference between content and journalism.”
A new way to protect against complaints
At the root of Trump’s complaint about “60 Minutes” was an exchange between correspondent Bill Whitaker and Kamala Harris, the president’s opponent in last year’s election. CBS aired two different reports — on “60 Minutes” and “Face the Nation” — depicting Harris giving two different answers to a Whitaker question about the war in the Mideast.
CBS News said both responses were part of Harris’ long-winded answer to the same question. But to people who saw both broadcasts, the effect was jarring; other news outlets say they have a strict policy, when they show an interviewer posing a question, that the immediate, direct response is aired.
CBS News defended it as routine editing. But it gave Trump an opening to charge that it was done to benefit Harris’ campaign.
“I don’t think the practices and standards are worse today than they were a few years ago,” Lukasiewicz said. “I think the consequences of mistakes are more serious than perhaps they used to be,” he said, because of the ability and willingness of politicians to seize on them.
In Noem’s pretaped talk with “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan this summer, the Homeland Security secretary complained CBS News had “shamefully edited the interview to whitewash the truth.” The network had shortened the interview, removing some accusations Noem had made about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant deported by the Trump administration.
In response, the network said that it would only air interviews on “Face the Nation” that were conducted live or, if taped in advance, would have to air in full.
More often, networks are defusing potential editing controversies by posting online full, unedited transcripts of key interviews, Lukasiewicz said. CBS News did that immediately when it aired a pre-taped edited interview with Trump on Nov. 2, along with video. The network didn’t release a transcript of its Harris interview for more than three months — not until Trump had sued and the FCC launched an investigation of the news division.
The Trump transcript release created its own issues, with dozens of amateur editors comparing the transcript to the shorter, edited interview that aired on “60 Minutes” to see what producers had decided to leave out.
The Justice Department released thousands of files Friday about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but the incomplete document dump did not break significant ground about the long-running criminal investigations of the financier or his ties to wealthy and powerful individuals.
The files included photographs of famous people who spent time with Epstein in the years before he came under suspicion, including some candid snapshots of Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein’s jet and invited him to the White House in the years before the financier was accused of wrongdoing. But there was almost no material related to another old Epstein friend, President Donald Trump, aside from a few well-known images, sparing the White House from having to confront fresh questions about a relationship the administration has tried in vain to minimize.
The records, consisting largely of pictures but also including call logs, grand jury testimony, interview transcripts and other documents, arrived amid extraordinary anticipation that they might offer the most detailed look yet at nearly two decades worth of government scrutiny of Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women and underage girls. Yet the release, replete with redactions, seemed unlikely to satisfy the clamor for information given how many records had yet to be released and because some of the materials had already been made public.
Democrats and some Republicans seized on the limited release to accuse the Justice Department of failing to meet a congressionally set deadline to produce the files, while White House officials on social media gleefully promoted a photo of Clinton in a hot tub with a woman with a blacked-out face. The Trump administration touted the release as proof of its commitment to transparency, ignoring that the Justice Department just months ago said no more files would be released. Congress then passed a law mandating it.
In a letter to Congress, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote that the Justice Department was continuing to review files in its possession, was withholding some documents under exemptions meant to protect victims and expected additional disclosures by the end of the year.
Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years before the two had a falling-out, tried for months to keep the records sealed.
But bowing to political pressure from fellow Republicans, Trump last month signed a bill giving the Justice Department 30 days to release most of its files and communications related to Epstein, including information about the investigation into his death in a federal jail. The law set a deadline for Friday.
Limited details about Trump
Trump is hardly glimpsed in the files, with the small number of photos of him appearing to have been in the public domain for decades. Those include two in which Trump and Epstein are posing with now-first lady Melania Trump in February 2000 at an event at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Trump’s connection to Epstein is well-documented, but he has sought to distance himself from his former friend. He has said he cut off ties with Epstein after the financier hired young female employees from Mar-a-Lago and has repeatedly denied knowledge of his crimes.
The FBI and Justice Department abruptly announced in July that they would not be releasing any additional records, a decision that was supported by Trump. But the president reversed course once it became clear that congressional action was inevitable. He insisted the Epstein matter had become a distraction to the Republican agenda and releasing the records was the best way to move on.
The White House, meanwhile, has moved to shift focus away from Trump’s ties to Epstein, with Attorney General Pam Bondi last month saying that she had ordered a federal prosecutor to investigate Epstein’s connections to Trump’s political foes, including Clinton.
Neither Trump nor Clinton has ever been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and the mere inclusion of someone’s name in the files from the investigation does not imply otherwise.
Among other prominent Epstein contacts is the former Prince Andrew, who appears in a photograph released Friday wearing a tuxedo and lying on the laps of what appear to be several women who are seated, dressed in formalwear. Pop star Michael Jackson also appears in multiple photos, including one showing him standing next to a smiling Epstein.
New photos of Clinton
Unlike Trump, Clinton is featured prominently in the files, though the records included no explanation of how the photographs of the former president related to any investigation or the context surrounding them.
Some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another shows him in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was also redacted. He is also seen in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.
This undated, redacted photo released by the U.S. Department of Justice shows Ghislaine Maxwell and former President Bill Clinton swimming with an unknown person.
U.S. Department of Justice via AP
Senior Trump White House aides took to X to promote the Clinton photos.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote “Oh my!” and added a shocked face emoji in response to a photo of Clinton in the hot tub.
“They can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton,” Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña said in a statement.
“There are two types of people here,” he said. “The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships after that. We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that.”
The Epstein investigations
After nearly two decades of court action, a voluminous number of Epstein records had already been public before Friday, including flight logs, address books, email correspondence, police reports, grand jury records, courtroom testimony and deposition transcripts.
Besides public curiosity about whether any of Epstein’s associates knew about or participated in the abuse, Epstein’s accusers have also sought answers about why federal authorities shut down their initial investigation into the allegations in 2008.
“Just put out the files,” said Marina Lacerda, who says she survived sexual assault by Epstein. “And stop redacting names that don’t need to be redacted.”
One of the few revelations in the documents was a copy of the earliest known concern about Epstein’s behavior — a report taken by the FBI of a woman in 1996 who believed photos and negatives she had taken of her 12-year-old and 16-year-old sisters for a personal art project had been stolen by Epstein. The documents don’t show what, if anything, the agency did with that complaint.
Police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein in 2005 after the family of a 14-year-old girl reported being molested at his mansion. The FBI joined the investigation. Authorities gathered testimony from multiple underage girls who said they’d been hired to give Epstein sexual massages.
Ultimately, prosecutors gave Epstein a deal that allowed him to avoid federal prosecution. He pleaded guilty to state prostitution charges involving someone under age 18 and was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
Epstein’s accusers spent years in civil litigation trying to get that plea deal set aside. One of those women, Virginia Giuffre, accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters, starting at age 17, with other men, including billionaires, famous academics, politicians and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then known as Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Prosecutors never brought charges in connection with Giuffre’s claims, but her account fueled conspiracy theories about supposed government plots to protect the powerful. Giuffre died by suicide in April.
Federal prosecutors in New York brought new sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019, but he killed himself in jail after his arrest. Prosecutors then charged Maxwell, his longtime confidant, with recruiting underage girls for Epstein to abuse. She was convicted in 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
The Justice Department’s extensive redactions to the Jeffrey Epstein files on Friday don’t comply with the law that Congress passed last month mandating their disclosure, according to Rep. Ro Khanna.
The California Democrat and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., led the effort on the legislation, which required that the DOJ put out its entire trove of documents by today.
But he blasted the document dump and singled out one file from a New York grand jury where all 119 pages were blacked out.
“This despite a federal judge ordering them to release that document,” Khanna said in a video posted on X. “And our law requires them to explain redactions. There’s not a single explanation. That entire document was redacted. We have not seen the draft indictment that implicates other rich and powerful men who were on Epstein’s rape island who either watched the abuse of young girls or participated in the abuse of young girls in the sex trafficking.”
He said Attorney General Pam Bondi has been “obfuscating for months” and called the files on Friday “an incomplete release with too many redactions.”
The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a separate X post, Massie agreed with Khanna, saying the DOJ “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law” that President Donald Trump signed last month.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 victims of Epstein or their relatives and redacted materials that could reveal their identities, according to the New York Times.
Earlier on Friday, Blanche told Fox News that “several hundred thousand” pages would be released on Friday. “And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” he added.
“Thomas Massie and are exploring all options,” Khanna warned. “It can be the impeachment of people at Justice, inherent contempt, or referring for prosecution those who are obstructing justice. We will work with the survivors to demand the full release of these files.”
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The highly anticipated Epstein files have so far landed with a thud as page after page of documents have been blacked out, with many nearly totally redacted.
While hundreds of thousands of documents have been released so far on the Justice Department’s site housing the information, there isn’t that much to see.
“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why.”
That appeared to refer to a document titled “Grand Jury NY.”
The data dump came late Friday, the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the trove of files, though other documents had already been released earlier by the DOJ, Congress and the Epstein estate.
Numerous celebrities were also in that document, such as Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger and the late pop idol Michael Jackson, who also appeared in photos with Epstein.
Former Senators John Kerry and George Mitchell were on the list as were Jes Staley, a former JPMorgan and Barclays executive, and Leon Black, a cofounder and former CEO of Apollo Global Management.
Appearing in the files doesn’t necessarily imply any wrongdoing as Epstein mingled in wider social circles and was ofter asked for charitable donations.
But Staley said he had sex with a member of Epstein’s staff, and Black was pushed out of Apollo over his Epstein ties, which Black maintains were for tax- and estate-planning services.
Numerous hotels, clubs and restaurants are listed too, plus locations simply described as “massage.” Banks included the now defunct Colonial Bank as well as Bear Stearns and Chemical Bank, which both eventually became part of JPMorgan.
Other entries fell under country categories like Brazil, France, Italy and Israel. Former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak were on the list.
Politics8 years ago