In March, the NBC Today show played the audio tape of the 911 call in the Trayvon Martin killing. The NBC staff had spliced the tape by deliberately deleting parts of the conversation between the 911 operator and George Zimmerman to make it look like Zimmerman said "this guy looks like he's up to no good. He's black," in one statement. What NBC deleted from the tape was the 911 operator’s specific question: “Is he black, white or Hispanic?”
By falsely making it look like Zimmerman was a racist, NBC’s scam - and a scam it was - further inflamed the racial hatred generated by the black teenager’s death at the hands of a white man.
Last month, after the audio tape scam was exposed, NBC fired a producer of the Today show. Now three more NBC staffers have been fired for their part in the tape splicing.
Miami’s WTVJ was the first NBC TV station to broadcast the falsified audio conversation and one of its reporters was among the NBC staff just fired.
WTVJ issued this apology to its viewers: "An error in editorial judgment was made in which a question from the operator was deleted which could have created the impression that Mr. Zimmerman's statement may have been singling out Trayvon Martin because of his race. We take this incident very seriously and apologize to our viewers."
An error in editorial judgment? A deliberate effort to mislead the viewers is not an error in judgment! A deliberate attempt to falsely paint Zimmerman as a racist is not an error in judgment! What we have here is a deliberate act of outright wrongdoing!
And WTVJ does not owe its viewers an apology. The station owes George Zimmerman an apology. It painted Zimmerman as a racist, which by all reports he is not, and helped to engender threats on the man’s life.
Of course, WTVJ is not about to issue Zimmerman an apology. The station management damn well knows that such an apology would create an angry backlash from WTVJ’s black viewers.
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