Dan Patrick’s case for ABC News to release full Obama ‘town hall’ video
You may already know that Dan Patrick of Texas maintains that ABC News edited for broadcast the White House town hall after police and civilian killings this month to distort what he said in what looked like a prickly exchange with President Barack Obama.
Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, has called unsuccessfully for ABC to post its unedited video of the event, which was taped the afternoon of July 14, airing that night. Separately, our requests for comment from ABC News haven’t drawn a reply.
We previously posted a White House-provided transcript of the full exchange between Patrick and Obama.
In response, Allen Blakemore, a Patrick political consultant, last week emailed us a statement from Patrick followed by a word-by-word comparison of the full Patrick-Obama transcript to the portion that aired, taking up a little more than seven minutes of the nearly hour-long program.
Today we’ve annotated the Blakemore-provided document to give a sense of Patrick’s case for ABC News releasing the full taping; see that annotation here.
Patrick’s analysis, what Blakemore emailed to us, correctly notes that the aired version of the town hall left out his acknowlegment to Obama that he’d earlier “used a word I should not have,” referring to his calling protesters who sought police protection during the Dallas shootings “hypocrites” in that they’d just been objecting to police actions in the march preceding the shootings that left five officers dead. On the air, Patrick is seen simply saying: “Words matter,” and going on to urge the president to not too quickly condemn police officers after incidents. Then again, David Muir, the ABC News anchor who hosted the town hall, noted on the air both Patrick’s original “hypocrites” comment and that Patrick had since said “you would have chosen different words.”
Patrick’s breakdown also accurately notes that the aired version left out his comment to Obama that “in Texas and everywhere, we don’t have perfect cops.” Also not shown: Patrick telling the president that to combat imperfect policing, “I’m committed to do whatever it takes. Tell me to go where, put me on a blue-ribbon panel, I’m there to help make this happen.”
