To: Charles Gibson, ABC News
Dear Mr. Gibson:
As a professional journalist and editor, I am gravely disappointed by ABC’s various broadcasts of excerpts from your interviews with Governor Sarah Palin.
I do not criticize your tough questioning of the governor — that’s a journalist’s job — although I found factual errors embedded in some of your questions.
What I find far more objectionable, even outrageous, however, is the arbitrary and misleading editing of many of Palin’s responses to your questions. Many distortions and misrepresentations about Palin and her views were generated by ABC’s editing, and they appeared across a host of ABC programs (“ABC World News Tonight,” “Nightline,” “Good Morning America,” and “20/20″) over several days of broadcasting.
I say this, again, as a journalist and editor who has conducted, edited, and published any number of interviews. Of course I realize the need to condense an excessively long interview to fit the requirements of page space or broadcast time. However, journalistic objectivity and integrity require that editorial condensations do not distort what the interview subject means to convey, thereby generating false impressions about the subject’s views, intellect, responsiveness, and honesty.
But that’s exactly what ABC did in its various broadcasts of Palin interview excerpts. Two manipulative editing techniques stand out in particular:
1. In all of the shows on which excerpts from the interview were broadcast, the videotape editors rarely let Palin finish a thought with a full reply. Instead, they selected only a fragmentary response, sometimes even cutting her off in mid-sentence. Any viewer can see this for himself, by the abruptness of the cutaways from her words followed by awkward jump-cuts to something else. This often left false impressions about her responsiveness to questions, the extent of her knowledge, and the nuances of her positions.
2. Watching the various ABC shows scattered over two days, I also discovered that their editors broadcast different fragmentary replies by Palin to the same questions. One could know that only by watching all of those shows and comparing which of several Palin responses was paired with the same question. On one show, a selected fragment might be so terse, incomplete, and off-point as to make Palin appear to be foolish or evasive; but if one watched a different ABC show, he’d find that its editors had selected a different Palin response to that same question — a response that was thoughtful and on-point.
Such cutting-room antics are transparently non-objective, even dishonest. They contribute to the widespread public view that major media organizations are driven by bias. In any case, they are simply unconscionable for any reputable journalistic outlet.
On its website, ABC has now published links to what it calls “full excerpts” from all three of your interviews with Palin. This is, of course, deceptive. A “full” interview transcript is unedited and complete; something taken from an interview is an “excerpt.” “Full excerpts” is therefore a contradiction in terms: The two words are mutually exclusive.
ABC appears to be trying to convince its viewers that these “full excerpts” include everything that Palin said. You and I both know that this is untrue: They include only those portions of her comments that ABC chose to broadcast. The very fact that they are “excerpts” means that ABC is holding back material that, for whatever reasons, it does not choose to reveal.
Mr. Gibson, at a time when many are questioning the reliability and integrity of major news organizations, I believe that you have the opportunity to restore a measure of credibility by releasing, online, the full interview transcripts of the interview — thereby allowing us to decide for ourselves the merits of whatever Governor Palin had to say, and her own qualifications for high office.
What do you say?
Sincerely,
Robert James Bidinotto
Robert Bidinotto is the editor of The New Individualist. Visit his blog at http://bidinotto.journalspace.com.
