The producer's dismissal followed an internal investigation that led to NBC apologizing for having aired the misleading edited audio of George Zimmerman's call to police thenight he shot Trayvon Martin..
NBC Producer Fired Over Zimmerman Call
NEW YORK (AP) — NBC News has fired a producer for editing a recording of George Zimmerman’s call to police the night he shot Trayvon Martin, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
The person was not authorized to talk about the situation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The identity of the producer was not disclosed.
An NBC spokeswoman declined to comment.
The producer’s dismissal followed an internal investigation that led to NBC apologizing for having aired the misleading audio.
NBC’s “Today” show first aired the edited version of Zimmerman’s call on March 27. The recording viewers heard was trimmed to suggest that Zimmerman volunteered to police, with no prompting, that Martin was black: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”
But the portion of the tape that was deleted had the 911 dispatcher asking Zimmerman if the person who had raised his suspicion was “black, white or Hispanic,” to which Zimmerman responded, “He looks black.”
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Later that night of Feb. 26, the 17-year-old Martin was fatally shot by Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla. Though Martin was unarmed, Zimmerman told police he fired in self-defense after Martin attacked him.
Questions subsequently have arisen over whether Zimmerman was racially profiling the teen, a theory the edited version of the tape seemed to support.
On Tuesday, NBC said its investigation turned up “an error made in the production process that we deeply regret.” It promised that “necessary steps” would be taken “to prevent this from happening in the future” and apologized to viewers.
Comments (1)
Craig Davenport says:
April 9, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Ahhh, the old days of DATELINE NBC have come back…yeah for NBC and its short memory. Now, if they can only hire (as a consultant) good, old, non-biased Dan Rather out of retirement and put his mug on the screen (before he passes on) for a few unapologetic pronouncements that the left is all warm and fuzzy and the right-wing of the political spectrum is the “Evil Empire” of the world…I’ll be in Television-land Nirvana…or is that “TV-Land Nauseum?” I just hope that George can find one of the finest libel lawyers (pro-bono) in this country and somehow, Jesse and Al would just blow away. I bet it’s too late now for that latest set of “Beer-Interventions” that only the “BIG ‘O'” can pull off. It seems he needed to stick his nose into something that wasn’t his business (or expertise either) and now, his “spin-meisters” have to go slopping around in the muck to fix that little faux pas. But as they say down on the farm, “When the cow is down, only then will the price of milk go up.”