In Exposing ACORN ‘Lies,’ Maddow Leaves Truth On the Cutting Room Floor

By Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism:

Rachel Maddow had a story to tell.  The story was that Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe’s ACORN videos were “severely edited” to make an innocent man who did the right thing look as though he was doing something nefarious, immoral and illegal.  She had almost an hour of unedited video footage to work with.  Her segment was approximately twelve minutes long so some editing had to be done.  What she chose to use and what she chose to leave out shows that she is guilty of exactly what she is accusing O’Keefe of doing.

She led with the tiresome and irrelevant argument about O’Keefe’s wardrobe during the opening credits versus what he actually wore in the ACORN offices.  Patterico rips this apart better than I can, instead, I want to expose Maddow’s first lie of her report as it relates to this “Pimp Costume” diversion.

In her blockbuster “exclusive” she breathlessly says:  “Check out the UNEDITED tape.  This is the very end of that visit to the office in San Diego.”  She then plays a clip that shows O’Keefe’s arm opening the door to the ACORN office and the video shows he is wearing a pin-stripe dress shirt.

Her narrative here is meant to suggest that by accessing the footage that O’Keefe purposely left out of his videos she is exposing the fraud of the pimp costume which O’Keefe desperately tried to conceal with his severe editing.  Only problem is the footage she shows is actually in the edited video!  That’s right, the blockbuster unedited video revelation she leads her story with has been released and available for all to see since September.

But that is only the beginning of Maddow’s attempt to re-write history.

Read the rest here: