Katie’s Deception Nothing New
By Jeff Knox
(June 1, 2016) Katie Couric’s unethical editing in her “documentary,” Under the Gun, a heavily biased propaganda film promoting gun control, attracted some harsh criticism, but the deceit involved is nothing new to rights activists. We’ve seen media distort, misrepresent, and outright lie about guns, gun laws, and gun owners for decades. The deception in the Couric film is just the latest in a long string of lies.
For those who might not have heard about the Couric flap, it boiled down to the director splicing in an awkward silence after Couric asks a group of rights advocates in Virginia how they propose we prevent felons and terrorists from buying guns without background checks. In the film, Couric asks the question and we then see video of participants looking uncomfortable, looking at the floor and scuffing their toes, with no response, for 8 full seconds before a dramatic cut to a new topic. The impression is that the group has been stumped by the question and simply doesn’t have an answer. In reality, members of the group responded almost immediately with a variety of comments. The awkward silence shown in the film was apparently shot while participants were waiting for the interview to begin.
After criticism of the unethical editing started popping up on FOX News and in print media (the other major television networks ignored the story), the director, Stephanie Soechtig, issued a statement saying the silence was just a way of giving the audience a moment to think about the significance of the question. Couric, who was the executive producer of the film and has repeatedly insisted that her objective was to give a balanced look at the gun issue from all sides, first backed up Soechtig, but later took “responsibility” for the “misleading” edit, saying she should have been more vigorous in her objections to the segment.
Couric’s former co-host on the Today show, Bryant Gumbel was also accused of creative editing the following week. Jim Sullivan, one of the designers of the AR-15/M16 rifle says his comments in an interview on Gumbel’s HBO show, Real Sports, were edited to make it appear that he opposes the sale of the AR-15 to civilians.
While some called for Couric to resign her position as “the face” of the Yahoo.com news division, and Gumbel caught a little flak, nothing came of the editing flaps. Even though many of their media colleagues don’t really like these two much, they almost unanimously support gun control, and they are more than willing to let lies and deceit be promulgated for what they see as a good cause.
We know this because we’ve seen it over and over again. For decades we saw video of “reporters” at shooting ranges breathlessly talking about the “killing power” of “assault weapons,” followed by video of someone firing a machine gun. These types of distortions were commonplace for years, and only tapered off after gun owners were able to start exposing them publicly through the power of the internet. We still see these sorts of things, but not as much as we did a few years ago.
What we do still see is selective presentation. Couric is not the first to claim to be open minded and fair – seeking the truth of the issue without the hype and distortion – only to present a heavily distorted, one-sided piece of anti-rights propaganda. A look at the “Partners” list and “call to action” on her film’s site makes it clear what the objective was. Like Couric, these people often do sit down and talk with rights advocates and gun safety experts, but the majority of that footage never makes it onto the screen. Couric and company recorded hours of interviews with rights advocates and experts like Professor John Lott, but in the end, only a scant few minutes of some of these interviews were included in the film. Nothing from the two hours with Professor Lott was included.
A 2011 HBO “documentary” called Gun Fight did the same thing. After hours of interviews with me at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in San Francisco, and a trip to the range with my friend Nicki Stallard, the final cut included only a brief clip from a speech I gave at the conference, and a few moments from the range trip. My in-depth discussion of the meaning and importance of the Second Amendment was cut, and Nicki, who is a transsexual, was never shown. Apparently a clean-cut, well-spoken, non-crazy advocate of the Second Amendment did not fit their agenda, and a transsexual gun rights advocate was just too far out of the narrative to even consider. To this day, a photo of my hands shooting Nicki’s .45 appears on the film’s synopsis page at HBO though.
Big Media’s bias against guns is a tradition going back at least to the New York Times’ support for the Sullivan law over a century ago. The current crop of, supposedly “documentary,” films reveal the same bias and a willful determination to support an established narrative. Drama, storytelling, and “the narrative” all take precedence over truth.