CBS News deceptively cropped body camera footage that showed a 13-year-old boy holding a gun before he was fatally shot by Chicago police in March.
A law enforcement officer fatally shot Adam Toledo during an encounter in response to gunshots heard on a police scanner. Police said Toledo ignored “verbal directions, fled, used significant force, and was armed with a semiautomatic pistol,” which is why the officer fired.
Body cam footage released this week appears to show Toledo holding a weapon moments before he was shot, but CBS News posted a clip to its website and Twitter page that cropped out the footage showing the teen’s alleged firearm.
Full video here. *At best*, CBS News looked at an explosive issue like a controversial police shooting & prioritized mobile screen viewing optimization over showing the full body camera footage (and thus edited out a key fact leading up to the shooting).https://t.co/b1P814LGjN
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) April 16, 2021
The CBS News article accompanying the cropped video did not directly acknowledge that Toledo was armed. Instead, the corporate media organization aired opposing claims from Eric Stillman, the law enforcement officer, who said he shot Toledo because he was “faced with a life-threatening and deadly force situation,” and Toledo’s family attorney, who claimed the gun was not in the teen’s hands when Stillman fired off a shot. CBS News did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
While a semiautomatic pistol was recovered at the scene, multiple politicians such as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed there was “no evidence” the teen fired the weapon before he was shot. Failed Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted that Toledo was “unarmed” during the incident.
"Unarmed" https://t.co/KUBdFizzrb pic.twitter.com/Tu4McdM0KJ
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 16, 2021
CBS News recently came under fire for deceptively editing out portions of a “60 Minutes” interview with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. While the corporate media organization deliberately left out portions of an interview with the Republican in an attempt to create a scandal surrounding his decision to use a local grocery store chain to administer COVID-19 vaccinations, untouched footage of the interview shows that CBS cut out key facts, such as which pharmacies received the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, when Publix was selected to distribute doses, and which location in Florida had the most seniors.
“The big lie, of course, which has been debunked by 100 percent of the people that have any type of knowledge on this, is that there was some type of conspiracy between Publix, which is our probably most respected company in the state, and me about some type of vaccine distribution that’s been debunked that was wrong,” DeSantis explained in a press conference after the edited segment aired.
