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Happy Monday. Today’s newsletter is a reminder about how easy it is to edit video to fit a certain narrative. And why it’s always important to stop yourself before you share something that makes you emotional and confirms your worldview.
A clip of Vice President Mike Pence helping deliver personal protective equipment to a Virginia nursing home started circulating on social media after late-night host Jimmy Kimmel featured it on his show.
A 40-second clip of the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” episode shared on Twitter shows Kimmel mocking Pence, saying he was caught on a hot mic apparently joking about carrying empty boxes.
“Here he is with no mask on, wheeling PPE’s into a health care center and doing his best to lift them. What a hero,” Kimmel says, “and since it was going so well, and also because he didn’t realize he had a mic on, Magic Mike decided to keep it going. Listen in closely here.”
Kimmel cuts back to Pence. Audio picks up one of the workers telling the vice president that the rest of the boxes in the van are empty. Pence can be heard responding, “Can I carry the empty ones? Just for the camera?”
The video ends, and Kimmel says, “Mike Pence pretending to carry empty boxes of PPEs into a hospital is the perfect metaphor for who he is and what he’s doing: A big box of nothing delivering another box of nothing.”
But the video is deceptively edited. The Kimmel clip cuts the video off at a selective point, just before Pence shuts the door to the van. Pence doesn’t touch or pretend to lift any empty boxes.
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Alex Mahadevan is a senior multimedia reporter at MediaWise. He can be reached at amahadevan@poynter.org or on Twitter at @AlexMahadevan. Follow MediaWise on TikTok.
