CBS plays the “blame it on the pressured young producer” game.

Crooks and Liars:

CNN’s Reliable Sources picked it up for a few minutes and even the MSMers agreed.

KURTZ: That is not what McCain said right after Katie said, “What’s your response to that?” And we see these pictures now of McCain with General Petraeus. That was used to cover an editing break, where then they substituted — not substituted, but added another answer that McCain had given from elsewhere in the interview.

STEVE ROBERTS: Well, I teach ethics at George Washington University. I would use this as a case study of what you should not do.

I was able to get the text of CBS’ own in house guidelines on their editing practices.

Answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response. In short, we cannot create an answer merely because we wish the subject had said it better.

CBS violated their own standards. At the end of the segment—Howard Kurtz said this:

KURTZ: CBS says that this was, in fact, a mistake made by a young producer under deadline pressure.

CBS’s latest excuse for breaking their own journalistic ethics is a farce. Their first response to this story was to say that it was no big deal:

Of the 14-minute interview, a little less than three minutes was used on the Evening News. A CBS spokesperson tells TVNewser, “As all news organizations do with extended interviews, last night’s Obama and McCain interviews were edited to fit the available time and to give viewers a fair expression of the candidates’ major differences. The full transcript and video were and still are available at CBSNews.com.”