Media continues to campaign for Kerry...

The integrity of the main stream media has taken some pretty big hits in this election year. Some were subtle, like the Time Magazine cover chicanery. And of course some of it was blatant. We had Rathergate, where CBS used forged documents to discredit the President, then continued to stand by them long after they had been exposed. We had Boogate, where the Associated Press falsely reported that Bush supporters had booed the news that Bill Clinton had been hospitalized. Most recently, we had NYTrogate, where the NYT ran, and continued to run, a story blaming Bush for the loss of munitions in Iraq when the facts were far from clear—and where CBS intended to break the discredited story less than 48 hours before election day.

Now we have some slight of hand from MSNBC, where Tom Brokaw has edited an interview with John Kerry to cover up a damaging remark.

In the original interview,

Brokaw said: "Someone has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do."

Kerry said: "That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where they are getting that from."

This is very significant, because Kerry has been claiming for months that his entire military record has been released. (I wrote about this and other things Kerry continues to hide here.) This is a direct admission that Kerry and his staff have been lying.

But when Brokaw reran the interview on a later broadcast, Kerry’s response had been edited:

Kerry said: "That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it."

The rest of the sentence is suddenly GONE, nowhere to be heard. Out. Of. Here.

Additionally, the MSNBC Dateline home page has a link to the Kerry interview, but it links to the edited version--minus the incriminating remark—not the original transcript. Why would Dateline edit Kerry’s quote mid-sentence, then promote the edited version of the transcript, with no indication that it had been edited, if not to cover for Kerry?

Pajama Journal has screen captures of both the original and edited transcripts in case they are altered or removed.

[via QandO]