NBC is under fire again for selective editing, this time after presenting video of presumptive GOP candidate Mitt Romney seemingly astounded while ordering a sandwich at a Pennsylvania convenience store.
According to Fox News, a broadcast on Monday of “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on MSNBC showed video of Romney appearing to be out of touch while ordering a hoagie sandwich at a Wawa machine in Cornwall, Pa.
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“It’s amazing," Romney said. The surrounding crowd appeared to laugh. “You have a touchtone keypad, and you touch that, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your sandwich,” he then said.
However, viewers did not see or hear nearly three minutes of the former Massachusetts governor discussing the paperwork required of a local optometrist to get the post office to change his address.
Romney was expressing mock amazement at Wawa’s efficiency, highlighting how the private sector outpaced the cumbersome federal bureaucracy.
"We went to Wawas — and it was instructive to me, because I saw the difference between the private sector and the governmental sector,” Romney said in a portion edited out of the segment. “People who work in government are good people and I respect what they do, but you see, the challenge with government is that it doesn’t have competition.”
NBC went further by splicing in a laugh track from another part of the speech at the Wawa.
And even Mitchell harkened back to George H.W. Bush’s failed 1992 re-election bid in the segment, recalling when he supposedly marveled at a supermarket scanner at a grocers’ convention. Bush actually was impressed by a then state-of-the-art device that could weigh food and read damaged bar codes.
That incident was reported by The New York Times as evidence that Bush was out of touch with everyday Americans.
Representatives for the Romney campaign declined to comment on Tuesday, but officials from the Romney camp had reached out to NBC, which promised to correct the issue.
The incident brought immediate criticism from radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
“MSNBC is back at it,” Limbaugh said on his Tuesday show. “MSNBC, NBC, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Washington — they've doctored another tape. And this time, everybody caught 'em.
“It was blatant, and they got caught. The worst thing that can happen to you, folks, is ridicule. And everybody is now ridiculing MSNBC.”
At the opening of her Tuesday show, Mitchell addressed criticism over the misleading edits.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about a conversation you and I had yesterday,” Mitchell said to MSNBC contributor Chris Cillizza, “We ran clips of Mitt Romney in Cornwall, Pa., talking about his trip to a Wawa.”
“The RNC and the campaign both reached out to us saying that Romney had more to say about that visit, about federal bureaucracy and innovation in the private sector,” she added before playing the unedited clip.
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Officials for NBC Universal, which owns MSNBC, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Last August, Ed Schultz of MSNBC played an edited clip in which then-presidential candidate Rick Perry described the national debt as a “big black cloud that hangs over America” to make it sound like a racial reference to President Barack Obama. Schultz later apologized.
And in March, NBC was caught editing the audio of George Zimmerman's 911 call as he watched Trayvon Martin in the minutes before he fatally shot the Florida teen.
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