The establishment media is accusing the White House of using a doctored video to revoke CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s hard press pass to the White House.
Acosta got into a slight scuffle with a White House intern at a press conference Wednesday after a tense back-and-forth with President Donald Trump.
The intern attempted to take the microphone and pass it to the next reporter, but Acosta pulled back and tightened his grip on the microphone when the intern reached for it. (RELATED: White House Suspends Jim Acosta Access Over Intern Incident)
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted out a video that zoomed in on the moment Acosta appeared to push the intern’s arm away from the microphone and wrote, “we stand by our decision to revoke this individual’s hard pass.”
“We will not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video,” she added.
We stand by our decision to revoke this individual’s hard pass. We will not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video. pic.twitter.com/T8X1Ng912y
— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) November 8, 2018
Many in the press accused the White House of speeding up the video to make Acosta’s motion look more aggressive than it really was.
Here is the original video courtesy of Fox News.
WATCH:
The video the White House uploaded allegedly came from Paul Joseph Watson, who is connected with InfoWars. Watson claims he did not deliberately “doctor” the video, but that the speed could have been unintentionally changed when he converted the video into a gif.
“Fact is, Daily Wire put up a gif, I download a gif, zoomed in saved it again as an mt2 file – then converted it to an mp4,” Watson told BuzzFeed News. “Digitally it’s gonna look a tiny bit different after processing and zooming in, but I did not in any way deliberately ‘speed up’ or ‘distort’ the video. That’s just horse shit.”
Rafael Shimunov, a video editor, placed Sanders’ video over an original CSPAN clip and noted the change in speed.
1) Took @PressSec Sarah Sanders’ video of briefing
2) Tinted red and made transparent over CSPAN video
3) Red motion is when they doctored video speed
4) Sped up to make Jim Acosta’s motion look like a chop
5) I’ve edited video for 15+ years
6) The White House doctored it pic.twitter.com/q6arkYSx0V— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) November 8, 2018
Luke Bailey, a former BuzzFeed writer, lended credence to Watson’s explanation, writing, “Any changes, if they did make them, would be incredibly minor – and possibly due to working across framerates and compressions.”
OK, I have been looking at this all morning – here’s C-Span vs. the InfoWars clip from @PrisonPlanet that the White House tweeted. Any changes, if they did make them, would be incredibly minor – and possibly due to working across framerates and compressions pic.twitter.com/4FasYDZv4a
— Luke Bailey (@imbadatlife) November 8, 2018
BuzzFeed News fact-checked the allegations of doctoring and also came to the conclusion that the conversion of “high quality video to a low quality gif” necessarily changed the speed. BuzzFeed’s article explains that they do not think the White House deliberately altered the video.
There’s no evidence that the video was deliberately sped up — but the change in format, from a high quality video to a low quality gif, turns the question of whether it was “doctored” into a semantic debate.
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 8, 2018
Video-to-gif conversion cuts frame rates by removing frames. A gif-making tool might reduce a source video to 10 frames per second from a raw, televised rate of 29.97 fps. When frames drop out, the video appears jumpier. Acosta’s arm seems to move faster. Everything accelerates.
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 8, 2018