Acosta video was ‘misleadingly edited’
NEW YORK: The Trump administration relied on a misleadingly edited video from a contributor to the conspiracy site Infowars to help justify removing the credentials of CNN’s chief White House correspondent, an escalation in President Donald Trump’s broadsides against the press.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, accused Jim Acosta, the CNN journalist, of “placing his hands on a young woman”, a White House intern, as Acosta asked questions that irked the president during a formal news conference on Wednesday.
“The question is: Did the reporter make contact or not?” Ms Sanders said in a statement. “The video is clear, he did.”
There is no evidence the video has been faked. But the editing, including zooming in and repeating several frames, exaggerated the contact between Acosta and the intern. The low quality of the video, which briefly freezes either deliberately or because of a glitch, adds to the ambiguity, the analysis showed.
Television footage showed that Acosta and the intern made brief, benign contact — “Pardon me, ma’am,” the correspondent said — as she tried to take a microphone away from him at Mr Trump’s behest.
But Ms Sanders posted a 15-second video clip on Twitter that suggested Acosta had pushed the intern’s upper arm. The clip was identical to one posted earlier by Paul Joseph Watson, an Infowars contributor, according to a forensic analysis by The New York Times.
“We will not tolerate the inappropriate behaviour clearly documented in this video,” Ms Sanders wrote.
Infowars, which has been banned by platforms like Twitter and Facebook, is known for spreading conspiracy theories, including one pushed by its founder, Alex Jones, that the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax.
Ms Sanders declined to say on Thursday why she had distributed the video from her official White House account.
The removal of Acosta’s credentials, which curbs his access to the West Wing and its staff, has little precedent in the modern White House. Past presidents have clashed with outspoken journalists like Sam Donaldson and Helen Thomas, but did not restrict their access.
Still, the move against Acosta, a frequent antagonist known for challenging the president during news conferences, was not entirely a surprise.
As a candidate in 2016, Mr Trump barred journalists from Univision, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News and Politico from attending his rallies. As president, he has popularised the phrases “enemy of the people” and “fake news” and threatened to pull broadcast licences and change libel laws to make it easier to sue.