NY Times Issues Correction to Blog Post on Steven Crowder Incident

The NY Times weighed in on the violence in Lansing yesterday. Today, after some prodding, the author issued a partial correction to his post.

The story by Robert Mackey for the Times‘ Lede Blog has a predictable left wing spin. Titled “Selective editing by Fox News contributor revealed by Fox News,” Mackey links to video clips by Lee Stranahan and Steven Crowder showing the tent being pulled down and punches being thrown. But like a number of other progressive blogs, the author then proceeds to argue the videos are “misleading.”

How exactly are the clips misleading? Mackey begins his explanation with and excerpt from the blog of former Daily Kos diarist Chris Savage. Savage says Crowder has edited together moments from throughout the day as if this proves something. The process of selecting the interesting bits of video is sometimes referred to as editing, except when liberals don’t like what it shows at which point it is called “selective editing.” In any case, Savage had to issue a correction for initially claiming Crowder faked being “shoved back into the crowd.” Video shows he was yanked backwards by the collar by another union member.

Eventually Mackey does get to his point which is that a longer clip shown on Fox News reveals the union member who assaulted Crowder was “knocked” to the ground before getting violent. Mackey doesn’t say who did the knocking, but the insinuation is that maybe Crowder started the fight (and maybe got what he deserved).

Mackey then takes this one step further, arguing that Crowder could “clear up the mystery” of how the union member ended up on the ground by releasing video shot from another angle:

There is one more anomaly in Mr. Crowder’s edit of the footage shot by his associates. The still frame he used for the clip’s title image on YouTube,which offers a much clearer image of the man punching him, wasobviously shot by a second camera, from an entirely different angle thanthe rest of the footage he presented of the man hitting him. If Mr.Crowder wants to clear up the mystery of exactly what happened justbefore he was punched, it might make sense for him to release anyfootage of the incident shot from that second angle.

After I pointed out Mackey’s article on Twitter, another user pointed out the flaw in Mackey’s theory “That “clip title image”? It’s a Detroit News photo, not a video still.” So much for the Zapruder film second angle. About 20 minutes later Mackey removed the above paragraph from his post and replaced it with this correction:

Correction: December 13, 2012

Anearlier version of this post referred incorrectly to a still image ofthe conservative activist Steven Crowder being punched that was uploadedto YouTube by Mr. Crowder. The image was not drawn from video shot froma second angle in Mr. Crowder’s possession, but was a photograph taken by a Detroit News photographer, John T. Greilick, who witnessed the incident.

So a glaring error has been corrected, but what about the insinuation that someone knocked the union member to the ground? Do we know that for certain or is that also a guess? Isn’t it possible he fell? Even if he was shoved, do we know who did what to whom? If we don’t, shouldn’t that be made clear?