On Thursday afternoon, our friends at RedState flagged this peculiar development that ABC News transcript excluded an exchange from the David Muir-President Trump interview where Trump scolded Muir for the media’s lack of coverage of the March for Life versus the Women’s March on Washington.
With an eagle eye for this detail, RedState’s “Streiff” provided a generous nod to Nicholas Fondacaro’s blog from Wednesday night and concluded it’d be pertinent to check out the full transcript.
That’s where Streiff ran into trouble:
Guess what? This entire exchange is simply omitted from the ABC transcript.
Is it a clerical oversight? Did they not like seeing powdered and blow-dried empty suit that runs their news operation stuttering away? Did it interfere with their narrative about Trump? Did they, in short, intentionally cut it? I don’t know anything more than that, but the omission seems to make Donald Trump’s point about March for Life coverage in a much stronger way than Trump did. In other words, that they’re so committed to not covering the size of the March they couldn’t even let this point stand on their website.
Further, Muir discussed this portion of the interview on Thursday during ABC’s Good Morning America:
ROBIN ROBERTS: It was such a wide-ranging interview, other topics. I was struck by when you asked about those million marchers the day after the inauguration all around the world. What did he have say about that?
DAVID MUIR: You know, it was interesting, Robin. We were walking along the colonnade and I asked the President, could you hear the marchers? They were right in front of the White House. He said I couldn't hear them but I did ask him, you are their President now and do you sense a responsibility to reach out to them? He said there's going to be another march this weekend, a pro-life march that will be even larger, perhaps and I said, you know, we don't want to compare crowd sizes here. I just wonder if you feel you need to unite the country and he said, I do, I do sense that responsibility but then he added but we just had an election.
Now, it’s a good possibility that ABC declined to include this portion in its full transcript because they weren’t sitting down but walking and talking. However, this is still misleading.
ABC and their social media accounts have repeatedly directed viewers to this link for a transcript of the interview and so, for those not able to watch the video version or see the hour-long special, they would flock here to draw their conclusions about was talked about.
