A Baltimore Fox affiliate apologized Monday night for a report it ran over the weekend that deceptively edited protesters to look like they were chanting “kill a cop.”
Gawker originally caught WBFF chopping up footage of a protest chant to sound like incitement to murder police on Monday.
The chant went “we won’t stop, we can’t stop, ’til killer cops, are in cell blocks,” according to C-SPAN footage.
But WBFF cut the audio short and told viewers that the words were in fact “we won’t stop, we can’t stop, so kill a cop.”
The station apologized both on its Facebook page and in an interview with one of the protestors leading the chant, Tawanda Jones.
“Although last night’s report reflected an honest misunderstanding of what the protesters were saying, we apologize for the error,” the post read.
“We have deleted the story on our webpage and we offered to have Ms. Jones on Fox45 News at 5:00 tonight for a live interview,” it continued.
In that interview, Jones called out the station several times for misrepresenting her words.
“The interesting part that really gets to me is, where you guys edited it and stopped — like, how could that be a mistake?” she said.
“Once you play that whole thing, you would know that’s not something that’s being said,” she added.
The interviewer apologized several times, and though Jones told the station she was grateful to come on, she also said she now fears for her reputation and her safety. Near the end of the interview she began to cry.
“At the end of the day, people’s lives are on the line,” she said. “Now, even though we’re doing this, I still don’t feel safe because I still feel like the message is out there.”
“What if a crazed-out cop or a crazed-out supporter thinks I’m trying to get cops killed?” she later said, wiping tears from her face.
Watch the interview with Jones below, courtesy of WBFF:
Sue them for every penny you can get out of Murdoch’s pockets!
So the station apologized, and the interviewer apologized. But I really doubt the interviewer was the one who did the initial report, or did the editing. So who is the station apologizing for? Someone needs to be held accountable. That’s what conservatives are all about, right? Accountability? So how 'bout some specific individual owning this “mistake” and, you know, answering her question: how could this be a mistake? And if if the station finds it wasn’t a mistake, how bout somebody gets fired?
Fox News affiliate Slogan -Unfair, Unbalanced and unhinged.
“Although last night’s report reflected an honest misunderstanding of what the protesters were saying, we apologize for the error,” the post read.
Yes, you hear what you want to hear (and what your target viewers want to hear). A real journalist would ask the protestors what they were chanting. Which explains why Fox News didn’t.
Well, the local Fox station WSVN in my area reported this morning that protesters have been chanting, ‘What do we want, dead cops’.
I don’t believe it was an error, I think they heard exactly what she was chanting but they edited the video to fix their narrative.