A Seattle TV station has fired a video editor after the station aired a clip of Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday that appeared to be doctored.
The video aired by Fox affiliate KCPQ seemed to make the president look even more orange than usual and looped a portion in which he can be seen sticking out his tongue between sentences, according to The Seattle Times.
The altered video came to light after a listener pointed it out to Todd Herman, who hosts a conservative talk radio show on KTTH.
“We performed a side-by-side comparison of the video from our listener, apparently taken by a smart phone recording of Q13, to the raw video of Trump’s speech from CNN,” Herman wrote on MyNorthwest.com.
The video comparison appears below:
Erica Hill, the station’s news director, responded to the allegations of fakery on Thursday.
“This does not meet our editorial standards and we regret if it is seen as portraying the president in a negative light,” she told The Seattle Times.
A few hours later, Hill released another statement:
We’ve completed our investigation into this incident and determined that the actions were the result of an individual editor whose employment has been terminated.
It is unclear whether the now-canned employee doctored video or just allowed it to go on air, the Seattle Times reported.
But while Hill regrets the video, Lester Black, a columnist at The Stranger, a Seattle-based alt weekly, called it “a conceptual failure.”
“If this editor really wanted to do something damaging to Trump they would doctor the video to show him helping a small brown kid do his homework or maybe show Trump wearing a pussy hat,” Black said. “These are the core values that upset Trump voters and Fox viewers.”
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