Sep 19, 2012 No Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Breitbart Gang: Mother Jones, the left-wing magazine that released a controversial video of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s remarks to a fundraiser in May, now admits that it has no full tape of what Romney said, and that its video is missing “one to two minutes” at the most important moment.
The Legal Insurrection blog’s William Jacobson and The Blaze both raised questions on Tuesday about whether Mother Jones had, as promised, revealed the full video, given an apparent jump cut in the critical section of Romney’s remarks.
“Something is missing. Romney’s 47% answer was cut off before completed, and is not picked up on the Part 2 audio video,” Jacobson noted.
Late Tuesday evening, Jacobson obtained the following comment from David Corn of Mother Jones:
According to the source, the recording device inadvertently turned off. The source noticed this quickly and turned it back one [sic]. The source estimates that one to two minutes, maybe less, of recording was missed.
Corn was forced to update his original post, which promised the “full” video, to reflect the fact that a key portion of the video is, in fact, missing.
There is no way to know, without the missing footage, exactly what Romney said. On Monday evening, Romney called for a complete video of his remarks to be released.
That now turns out to be impossible, either because Romney’s remarks were never recorded in full (as Mother Jones now claims), or because some of his remarks–perhaps mitigating some of the controversial effect of his statements–were selectively edited out of the tape by Mother Jones or its chain of sources (including former President Jimmy Carter’s grandson).
Earlier on Tuesday, new media pioneer James O’Keefe pointed out the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in accepting, without question, a snippet of a video recording that aimed to portray a Republican in a bad light, while conservatives are still doubted even after providing full video or audio, as O’Keefe did with his famous ACORN tapes.
Whether Romney is right or wrong about the “47 percent” of Americans he says have become dependent on government–he stood by his May remarks on Monday evening–he may have been taken out of context.
Mother Jones has failed a basic test and broken its promise to its readers and the public. There is now reason to doubt that it provided Romney’s full remarks–not just the context, but the remarks themselves. And there is new reason to suspect manipulation.
Corn promised the complete version of Romney’s remarks. Instead, he provided a version that is missing a large portion of video at the critical moment.
Mother Jones’s entire story now deserves to be treated with suspicion, if not contempt.
(THE BLAZE) Tuesday afternoon, the site Mother Jones released what was described as the “full,“ ”raw and uncut” video of Mitt Romney’s comments at a private campaign fundraiser, which has drawn immense criticism from both sides. The “uncut” videos leave out a critical portion of the speech, as Romney was beginning to explain his now infamous “47 percent” remarks, and pick up in an altogether different location.
Mother Jones released the two “full” videos of Romney with great fanfare. The site states:
“Romney is not the only one who has called for the release of the full 49-minute video. And we’re more than happy to oblige. The complete video demonstrates that Romney was not snippetized and that he was captured raw and uncut. Here it is, in two parts”
However, one simply has to watch the videos back to back to see that there is clearly no natural link between them. Below is our video, showing the final ten seconds of the first film and the first ten seconds of the last. These videos were captured directly as they are on the Mother Jones website.
The video transcribed would read:
[Romney]“We do all these polls — I find it amazing. We poll all these people to see where you stand in the polls but 45 percent of the people vote for the Republicans and 48 or 49–,”
This is where the first part of the video cuts out.
Part two picks up seemingly on a completely different subject: China.
“…about twice as much as China, not 10 times as much like is reported. And we have responsibility for the whole world, they’re only focused on one little area of the world, the south china sea…”
The topics nor the pick up points in the sentence are the same in the two videos. Romney himself claimed this video was edited and called for “the person who has the video would put out the full material.”
Mother Jones writes that the cries of selectively editing were “not true” and that Romney’s comments ”were shown in full.”
UPDATE:
The blog Legal Insurrection was able to get a comment from David Corn, the reporter at Mother Jones peddling the videos, regarding the missing footage. Corn admits there are, in fact, about one to two minutes that are unaccounted for.
