Acosta video shared by White House said to be ‘doctored’
WASHINGTON — White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday night shared a video of CNN reporter Jim Acosta that appeared to have been altered to make his actions at a news conference look more aggressive toward a WhiteHouse intern.
The edited video looks authentic: Mr. Acosta appeared to swiftly chop down on the arm of an aide as he held onto a microphone while questioning President Donald Trump. But in the original video, Mr. Acosta’s arm appears to move only as a response to a tussle for the microphone. His statement, “Pardon me, ma’am,” is not included in the video Ms. Sanders shared.
Critics said that video — which sped up the movement of Mr. Acosta’s arms in a way that changed the journalist’s response — was deceptively edited to score political points. The White House suspended Mr. Acosta’s press pass after the news conference.
The edited video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, known for his conspiracy-theory videos on the far-right website Infowars.
Mr. Watson said he did not change the speed of the video and that claims he had altered it were a “brazen lie.” Mr. Watson, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, told BuzzFeed he created the video by downloading an animated image from conservative news site Daily Wire, zooming in and saving it as a video — a conversion he says could have made it “look a tiny bit different.”
Side-by-side comparisons support claims from fact-checkers and experts such as Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, who argued that crucial parts of the video appear to have been altered so as to distort the action.
A frame-by-frame breakdown by Storyful, a socialmedia intelligence firm that verifies media content, found that the edited video included repeated frames that did not appear in the original footage. The repeated frames were shown only at the moment of contact and made Mr. Acosta’s arm movement look more exaggerated, said Shane Raymond, a journalist at Storyful.
The video has become a flashpoint in the battle over viral misinformation, turning a live interaction watched by thousands in real time into an ideological tug of war. It also has highlighted how video content — long seen as an unassailable verification tool for truth — has become vulnerable to distortion.
Mr. Albright said videos like this pose an even greater risk of perpetuating misinformation than completely faked news videos, because they contain a grain of truth and will likely be given the assumption of accuracy.
“It’s something that’s real but has been literally stretched … and molded into weaponized evidence,” he said.
In Ms. Sanders’ tweet of the edited video, she said the White House would “not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video.” On Thursday, she said, “The question is: Did the reporter make contact or not? The video is clear, he did. We stand by our statement.”
In a tweet, Matt Dornic, a CNN communications executive, addressed Ms. Sanders: “You released a doctored video — actual fake news.”