Comment by DontKnowMe

Comments on this story seem generally to lack knowledge of how TV News works, as a business and as a communication form.

First, all of this is done on the cheap. The network staffs are all looking to do as little work as possible to keep their payrolls as low as possible. So, as far as the original story goes, yes, Luciano may have edited it herself, or more likely made the edit-decisions which were executed by a techie who could handle all the Chyron and compositing that they throw in to make it look slick.

Once that goes up the wire from local to network, all sorts of production staff are recycling it to fit their own particular shows: GMA, Nightly News, different MSNBC shows, etc. They're mainly changing the heads and tails so the story fits into the wraparounds for their Stars, and cutting it for time. These are low status jobs, likely with very little oversight.

The whole news cycle moves so fast that errors just get embedded in the process and repeated over and over because no one's paying attention.

So it seems like they keep generating new stories about topic X, when basically they're just playing the same thing over and over, and it looks like it has the imprimatur of the august Nightly News, when it was actually just thrown together by the B-squad down at some local affiliate. Why? Because it's cheaper and easier to do it that way.

Now the next thing you need to remember is that this is a the idiot box blare of sound bite society, not a courtroom presentation of evidence. The program editor has assigned the story a length, just like a newspaper editor decides how many column inches will be devoted to a story well before the reporter actually writes it up. So the person cutting the story HAS to edit for time, and has to prioritize 'what is the most important thing', and 'most important' is always what makes a 'sexier' story, grabs 'more eyeballs' gets the viewers to look up from their Cream of Wheat.

In this, Luciano most likely felt she was doing nothing wrong. As Jeralyn noted above, the edit in question cuts out the operators question, and makes Zimmerman's first utterance of "He looks black" seem to be volunteered rather than simply an honest response to a direct question. However, a full forty seconds later, unprompted in any way by the operator, Zimmerman says "He's got his hand in his waistband. And he's a black male." interjecting the issue of race for no discernable reason.

So you're cutting this exchange with all it's verbal subtleties down to two tight soundbites that have to communicate the gist of the situation. Zimmerman did make an odd reference to Martin's race out of the blue, he just did it 40 seconds after the first part of the quote.

.....So do you cut the quote so it seems (falsely) that Zimmerman made no notice of Martin's race, or do you smush it together in a way that falsifies the context of the specific sound clips but is arguably a better representation of the tenor of the call?

I have over 30 years of experience editing actuality footage for (non-political) documentaries, and the one thing I can say for sure is that the media lens always distorts. There is no such thing as objective footage. Your rushes NEVER present the truth, at least not in any way an audience could understand it. You have to manipulate it to make it make sense, and be fair and honest.

IMHO, the edit in question was over the line, and I think the parties responsible should have been fired. But that's a judgement call, NOT a no-brainer.

Lay people always focus on obvious things like the editing out of the operators question. Those are NEVER the most influential parts of the manipulation that goes into story telling. Far more important in this case were the countless news stories that aired clips of this segment of the call:

    Z: Sh*t, he's running.
    O: He's runnning? Which way is he running.
    Z: Down towards the other entrance of the neighborhood.
    O: OK. Which entrance is that that he`s heading towards?
    Z: The back entrance. Fu*kin __
    O: Are you following him?
    Z: Yes.
    D: OK. We don`t need you to do that.
    Z: OK.

There is no obvious manipulation here. I'm not aware of any great complaint rising about this clip. But it stops short of what happens next, which is that Zimmerman loses sight of Martin. The clip, as cut, implies without directly stating, that Zimmerman continued to directly track Martin from that point on until the fatal shooting, and THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. But no obvious edit kerfuffle there. No one's going to get fired.

As a final note, when Fox News gleefully ran their story about NBC's bad edit, the version of Zimmerman's call they played for comparison, their 'real thing' was also, in fact, edited. For time, of course.

Please respond to DontKnowMe and please use asterisks (but not double asterisks which render the text in bold) if you feel the need to refer to the specific profanity used.

Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking to a family friend's home in a gated community in Sanford,Florida, when he was shot dead by a Neighborhood Watch captain.

The court case will try to determine why they were fighting, whether Zimmerman grabbed Martin to stop him from leaving before the police came, or if Martin attacked Zimmerman because he was angry about being profiled or having the cops called on him. But whatever the reason, clearly Zimmerman didn't just shoot him while he was walking home, and news reporters are just ginning up racial antagonism by being dishonest about what happened.

MSNBC and Faux News are deliberalty stirring the racial pot so they can continue raking in big bucks from angry audiences on both sides. By the time this is over, if a jury determines that Zimmerman is innocent of the charges, we're likely to have race riots because of the continued misleading of the public by our media.

And this certainly isn't confined to the Zimmerman story; it became particularly egregious during the run-up to the Iraq war - which maybe set new low standards for truthiness, as it now permeates reporting on politics, the economy, legislation, anything controversial or sensational, and for all I know, even the weather reporting is skewed.

Once you do know as much of the story as possible, it's not that hard to divine what the agenda is behind the missing details; once it's out there, and everywhere, it becomes the conventional wisdom and is extremely difficult to counter - people still believe that if they see or hear it on the news, it must be true.

ZIMMERMAN: He's got his hand in his waistband. And he's a black male.

I'm struggling with what to do with your comment because I don't allow profanity here, the word has to be stated with asterisks in place of some letters.  One commenter already repeated it in response and I deleted his comment.

The reason has nothing to do my personal sensitivities, but because censor software used by law firms and other businesses (including libraries) see those words and can put TalkLeft  on a list of sites to be blocked. It happened years ago and took me days to (1)track down the software company (which I was able to do through the law firm which emailed me that TalkLeft had been blocked  at work), (2) send faxes and try to find a "live" person to talk to (3) get to a person with authority to remove TalkLeft from the list (4) wait for it to filter down to the firms and businesses using the software.

I don't know if that's still how censor stuff works, but I'm not risking it. And I don't have the ability to edit comments, only delete them.

So even though the 911 tape contains those words, if you or anyone else wants to post further on the this, you must use asterisks or the comment will be deleted.

You comment is so long and detailed, I may let it stay. I haven't yet decided. In addition to the F* word and A* word you have the c**n word.  If you are still around and can post a duplicate of your comment with asterisks inside the words, it would be appreciated. If not, I'll have to figure out something, but please copy your comment for your computer in case I end up deleting it.

In this, Luciano most likely felt she was doing nothing wrong. As Jeralyn noted above, the edit in question cuts out the operators question, and makes Zimmerman's first utterance of "He looks black" seem to be volunteered rather than simply an honest response to a direct question. However, a full forty seconds later, unprompted in any way by the operator, Zimmerman says "He's got his hand in his waistband. And he's a black male." interjecting the issue of race for no discernable reason.

I (and many others) think there was a discernable reason for the second comment, and it was not out of the blue. We may be right or wrong, and it's still an open question, but a reporter has no business substituting his or her opinion into a factual rendition of what happened, so that the end result supports that opinion.

When the dispatcher first asked him what race the suspicious person was, GZ responded "He looks black." Not "He is black" Or "black" or "He's black." It sounds like he wasn't sure at that point, so he used the word "looks" as in "He appears to be black" or "I think he's black but I'm not certain."

When he saw Trayvon at a closer distance and described his hand being in his waistband, he added "And he's black" . This could easily response to the dispatcher's question.

If Luciano made the same judgment you did, that the comment  about race 40 seconds later was for no discernible reason, so it was okay to blend the quotes, then she's a bad reporter, because in doing so, she substituted  her personal opinion as to what GZ meant into a  direst quote of what he said., taking the statements out of context to fit her assumption.  None of us know what GZ meant by that, I have my theory, you have yours, but the point is a reporter shouldn't blend quotes to fit his or her personal opinion of what someone meant.

... just like a newspaper editor decides how many column inches will be devoted to a story well before the reporter actually writes it up.

Jeralyn, reporters -- at least, in print -- often splice together quotes, but the good ones manage to convey the meaning of what the person said.