Yesterday, thanks to a tweet from Michael Moore, a clip of President Obama delivering a speech to West Point cadets made the rounds online.
What made the clip go viral was that it was from Fox News’ coverage of the speech, and it appeared to have been edited to make the President look bad. Obama had two lines, about pulling out of Iraq and the war on terror, that drew applause from the cadets. The sound of applause looks to have been edited out of the Fox News clips, leaving the president standing in silence.
So what happened?
The most plausible explanation comes from Inside Cable News, who notes that while the video was clearly edited, the odds of it being intentional are slim:
These two clips were meant to be used separately on the air and not spliced together. But someone decided to put the two together for the web but did it quick and sloppy and didn’t trim off the “dead air” parts. So Michael Moore is right that FNC cut out the audio. But he’s wrong that it was done deliberately to make Obama look bad. The only thing FNC is guilty of is having a lazy video editor and a not at all alert web staff that allowed the clip to go online in that form.
A perfect example of Hanlon’s razor in action.