This one won't be replayed 600+ times over four days like the original exuberant Howard Dean speech, but CNN's top exec has admitted they may have "overplayed" the post-Iowa speech. They are not actually admitting they did anything wrong in incessantly playing the clip, causing the Dean campaign to go into a freefall. The only thing they actually admit to doing wrong is not airing a Diane Sawyer interview earlier. The Sawyer piece reveals that, due to the type of microphone the news networks used to get the audio feed for that speech, the magnitude of the scream was overplayed. The audio feeds that did not filter out crowd noise showed that the "angry scream" was all but inaudible to the live audience.
So, to recap: CNN took a clip of a presidential candidate rallying the troops that excludes some very important audio context, replayed it incessantly for four days, covered the other two frontrunner candidates with 71%-86% positive coverage, and covered late-night talkshow hosts making fun of the candidate's speech. The cumulative effect of this was to make people doubt the candidate's ability to lead (ironically because he was leading his followers), causing his prospects for the nomination to plummet faster than a flying sheep. And the 24-hour news networks blame the nature of the 24-hour news network rather than their own failure to get a grip on their own reporting, all while not actually admitting that they screwed a man over.
And all the while, the networks made nary a mention of blatant contradictions in George Bush's State of the Union address.
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