It's All About Editing

We are all familiar with reality shows, and their uncanny ability to edit story lines, reactions, conversation, etc. (i.e. The Amazing Race, The Apprentice, The Bachelor, you name it...). Many a contestant has blamed an unflattering portrayal of themselves on a show to strategic editing by producers to create a good story. And truly, with editing you can take tape and make any story you want. The splicing can be as choppy or as smooth as you care to make it. But in the case of reality shows, who cares? Right?

What if that same approach is used in news reporting? I found this article to be quite enlightening. It highlights an example of NBC's Andrea Mitchell attempting to portray Mitt Romney as "out of touch" with the American people, by craftily splicing a campaign trail speech. If you watch the video, you observe that the segments NBC used completely misrepresent Romney's point, and were used as a means to an end. The article also mentions other incidents in which the news chose to, in my opinion, "dig a pit for their neighbor" (2 Nephi 28:8).

It's highly disturbing to me, that news agencies are becoming less trustworthy. It seems to take a lot more research than should be necessary to gather information in order to make educated decisions about things.

Speaking of attempting to portray Romney as "out of touch", here is another article that suggests late night show hosts' jabs at Romney's wealth might be a bit hypocritical (Jay Leno's net worth $150 million; Jon Stewart's net worth about $80 million; Colbert's net worth $45 million; Letterman's net worth $400 million; Jimmy Fallon's net worth $16 million, Bill Maher's monetary value $23 million).

Of course, the most ironic point of all is that Obama is a millionaire, but somehow that is overlooked.

As Dan Gainor (VP of Business and Culture for Media Research Center) put it, "Journalists and Hollywood all want to pretend they were one with the common man. They aren’t. Sure some of them might have paid their dues long ago, but those dues have been paid back with a mighty interest.They are part of the elite in both wealth and access, they don’t care about Romney’s wealth. They care that he is not on their team.”