In the wake of Jim Acosta’s public bullying by our President, and the attempt to literally pull the microphone from his hand as he asked a question, the White House has removed Acosta’s credentials, citing the reason that he “put his hands” on the intern who was trying to take the microphone. The C-Span footage does not show any such action taken by Acosta. The White House then released a video, showing the same incident, but with Acosta taking more forceful action to push the intern away.
The Associated Press asked Abba Shapiro, a video producer, to examine the video tweeted out by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, and he concluded that the video had been doctored to speed up Acosta’s hand movements and give the impression of violent action.
While it is tragic that the White House has acted, once again, in a way that I didn’t think was possible, setting a new low for the administration’s behavior, this incident represents a further slide away from reasoned democracy and towards an Orwellian dystopia. While President Trump has made no effort to hide his contempt for the press, and has made every effort to undermine those journalists who are trying to uncover the truth about a myriad of things, including but not limited to the Trump ’16 campaign’s involvement with Russia, the President’s involvement with those actors who were conducting business with Russia (including his own son, Donald Trump Jr.), the President’s financial history with foreign powers, and the President’s actions that may be interpreted as Obstruction of Justice, this video doctoring goes far beyond screaming “Fake News” or lying to the public about voter fraud or Inauguration attendance numbers.
This is the White House transforming into Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. The bold-faced lying, while troubling, can be disputed by the referencing of facts and easily dismissed. This is about doctoring evidence and creating a new narrative in the public consciousness. This is putting a brazen untruth out into the public eye, giving people the ability to “see for themselves” and “make their own judgments” because there are not only two opposing views, but two opposing sets of “facts.”
The real tragedy is that Trump’s staunch supporters will not even see the real footage. The doctored tape will be distributed through FOX, Breitbart, and other conservative outlets, and they will make no mention of the real tape. The people who only see news through these highly biased (and borderline propogandist) sources will not even be aware of the controversy. They’ll simply take that “news” at face value, and when challenged, will simply come back with the same old arguments about how the media bias is geared against the President and they will lie, cheat and steal to undermine him. They’ll never sit and watch the two tapes side by side, they’ll never question Sarah Sanders’ words, and will think justice is being done as Acosta is removed from the press corps.
This incident is preying on the very natural and instinctive tendency in humans to only pay attention to those things that confirm their already existing opinions. This is going to new extremes to feed confirmation bias at its worst. Trump’s efforts to silence the media have so far failed, so the White House has taken a new tactic – creating an alternate set of evidence to “prove” the illegitimacy of the media.
We, as citizens, have to stand up against these efforts to destroy our democracy. We have to ensure that, when history looks back at the Trump era, we see the truth, not Trump’s truth. We need to see that Trump did indeed lose the popular vote, and not because of “millions of illegals” voting against him. We have to see that his inauguration did not “break attendance records.” We need to see that his attempts to get in the media’s way is not out of some sense of righteousness or justice, but to cloud the truth, and obscure it from the public eye.
We need to see that Jim Acosta was doing nothing but exercise his First Amendment rights, and that made him an enemy of the White House.
