Selective Editing?

Selective Editing?

A man has be arrested for making threats against Barack Obama.
Notice any difference in how the story is told, however?
CNN's version:

A man is being held in Florida on charges he threatened to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, according to court documents. An affidavit filed by a Secret Service agent in U.S. District Court claims that Raymond Hunter Geisel, of Marathon, Florida, threatened to "kill, kidnap and cause bodily harm upon a major candidate for president of the United States, that is, Senator Barack Obama."
The affidavit says Geisel made the threats while attending a bail bondsman training class in Miami.
During an interview with the Secret Service, Geisel denied threatening Obama, but told agents that "if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he would simply shoot him with a sniper rifle."
He later said that comment was a joke, the agent said in the document.

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AP's version:

A man who authorities said was keeping weapons and military-style gear in his hotel room and car appeared in court Thursday on charges he threatened to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, was arrested by the Secret Service on Saturday in Miami and was ordered held at Miami's downtown detention center without bail Thursday by a federal magistrate.
A Secret Service affidavit charges that Geisel made the threat during a training class for bail bondsmen in Miami in late July. According to someone else in the 48-member class, Geisel allegedly referred to Obama with a racial epithet and continued, "If he gets elected, I'll assassinate him myself."
Obama was most recently in Florida on Aug. 1-2 but did not visit the South Florida area.
Another person in the class quoted Geisel as saying that "he hated George W. Bush and that he wanted to put a bullet in the president's head," according to the Secret Service.
Geisel denied in a written statement to a Secret Service agent that he ever made those threats, and the documents don't indicate that he ever took steps to carry out any assassination. He was charged only with threatening Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, but not for any threat against President Bush.
Geisel's court-appointed attorney declined comment.
In the interview with a Secret Service agent, Geisel said "if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle, but then he claimed that he was just joking," according to court documents.
A search of Geisel's 1998 Ford Explorer and hotel room in Miami uncovered a loaded 9mm handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition including armor-piercing types, body armor, military-style fatigues and a machete. The SUV was wired with flashing red and yellow emergency lights.
Geisel told the Secret Service he was originally from Bangor, Maine, and had been living recently in a houseboat in the Florida Keys town of Marathon, according to court documents. He said he used the handgun for training for the bail bondsman class, had the knives for protection and used the machete to cut brush in Maine.
In the affidavit, the Secret Service said Geisel told agents that he suffered from psychiatric problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, but he couldn't provide the names of any facilities where he sought treatment.

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Sorry, AP, I don't want to get sued, but need the whole thing for comparative purposes.

The suspect also hated President Bush and is quoted as wanting to put a bullet in his head, so he's an equal opportunity assassination fantasist.

Why CNN didn't think that detail was newsworthy?

CBS 4's hack editing job was even worse, cutting the Bush reference out of the middle of the story but overlooking the reference in the last line:

Federal authorities in Florida are holding a man accused of threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The man, Raymond Hunter Geisel, was ordered held without bail at a Thursday court hearing.
The Secret Service says Geisel made the threat while training to be a bail bondsman in Miami in late July. A search of Geisel's SUV and hotel room uncovered a loaded handgun, knives, dozens of rounds on ammunition, boy armor, and a machete. The SUV was also wired with emergency lights.
Geisel claims he's originally from Bangor, Maine. He said he made no threat against either Obama or the president.

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I can only speculate as to why the media would remove the threat against Bush in these accounts. Is it because it is harder to portray Obama as the victim when he isn't the only one threatened, or just harder to sell the meme that the offender is probably a murderous racist when he threatens a white president as well?

Update: Updated to include AP's story. Will remove it if they ask.

Update: Interesting. After two hours of commenters blaming ignorant/racists/morons/Republicans/Hillary Clinton fans/Southerners/rednecks/anti-black/Fox News/Rush Limbaugh and white people in general, CNN shut down comments on their story at 6:45 PM, just two minutes after "hollowpoint" posted:

While he wasn't arrested for it, the racist nutjob also said that he'd like to put a bullet in Bush's head… yet CNN doesn't feel that was relevent enough to include on their blog story? The extra two sentences would've taken up too many bytes? Or was it that CNN wanted to portray the nutjob in question as a "typical" right wing racist who wanted to kill Obama? Letting your partisan mask slip a bit are you, CNN?
Given the nature of this election, don't even try to make the excuse that it wasn't relevant, or that the story as presented doesn't create a false impression of the man arrested.

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Sometime later—perhaps the 8:19PM update now showing—CNN finally posted the entire story, including the threats made by the suspect against President Bush.

After 3-4 hours of letting half-truths percolate to establish the narrative, CNN then they filled in the rest of the story, after the damage was done.
They could have posted the correct story, the entire story, before 4:00 PM. CNN posted only part of the story, allowing paranoia, biases, and dark fantasies to fester. All of these raging emotions would have been muted, if not eliminated, if it was revealed what CNN know for the beginning, which was the fact that Bush was also a target of Geisel's rage.

CNN significantly altered a story to play upon people's fears.

That cannot lightly be excused.

Update: Curiouser and curiouser... you can still access the original URL of the CNN story at:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/07/breaking-man-held-for-obama-assassination-threat/

Interestingly enough, however, if you go to the CNN Political Ticker and scroll down, the exact same story now has this URL:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...-held-for-alleged-obama-assassination-threat/

Perhaps most telling however, is that all the comments associated from the previous story—the racially-tinged, poltically motivated anger they helped generate with their selective editing"have not been ported over to the new URL.

The whitewash continues...

Click to expand...