Classy: Fox Erases Applause from Obama's West Point Speech
Fox News may have gotten itself in hot water over some selective editing, much like they did a few months ago when they edited clips from a large protest to make it appear that a sparsely attended Tea Party rally looked quite...robust. This time, though, they're editing Obama's speeches to make them seem less successful.
President Obama recently gave the commencement speech at West Point. Given the voting record of the U.S. millitary, you can imagine that it wasn't the friendliest audience the President has faced, but he's the president, and a lot of the audience's commanding officer, so they afforded him a due amount of respect, golf clapping at the appropriate junctures.
At one point, Obama extolled the success of the Iraq operation, noting that we would be stopping our combat mission there shortly. He was met with some of the most robust applause from the cadets, if for no other reason then they are probably excited not to have to go to Iraq. You can see the speech from the White House website below. The section in question starts at 9:40, and the applause comes at 10:28:
But, if you watched the speech on Fox's YouTube channel, you'll note that no applause can be heard. The troops, apparently, offer only stony silence when the president talks about what he sees as foreign policy accomplishments. Fox will probably say they were picking up some sort of direct feed of the speech that didn't pick up crowd noise, but as you listen, you can hear the sound from the video cut out entirely. There even seems to be a visible cut to the clip before he begins speaking again. The applause in question begins 0:45 into this video:
Surely we'll be hearing more about this, including some pathetic excuses or perhaps the suspension of an employee. It's surprising the video is still available on YouTube, but maybe Fox is standing by their applause free version of the speech.
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