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The Trials of Editing
Cannon, a longtime political reporter and White House correspondent for The Washington Post, is the author of five books, including three biographies of Ronald Reagan.
The mythology of the Rodney King incident derives almost entirely from the edited version of the videotape George Holliday shot from his apartment-house balcony. That version begins more than halfway through an incident in which officer Stacey Koon tried to take King into custody without hurting him. This fact in itself sets the incident apart from numerous proven cases of police brutality in which victims were hit, choked, or shot without provocation. It also sets the incident apart from classic police pursuits in which excited or angry officers, adrenaline pumping, reflexively beat a suspect once they catch him. Several minutes elapsed between the end of the King pursuit and the first baton blows, an interim in which officers tried to take King into custody Ð first with verbal commands, then by gang-tackling him and trying to handcuff him, then with Koon's two bursts from his powerful electric stun gun. King was not struck with a baton until he climbed to his feet after being hit by the second burst from t Taser, then charged toward Officer Laurence Powell.
That these facts are not known or remembered by the public even after three trials is primarily the fault of television. KTLA won the prestigious Peabody Award for showing the Holliday videotape, but when editors at that Los Angeles station deleted the frames of King's charge in their effort to remove subsequent blurry footage, they removed the explanation for Powell's first and most damaging baton blow. Had television not stacked the deck against the officers with its shameless editing of the videotape (done, it seems, in the interest of improving picture quality, rather than out of editorial bias), the Simi Valley trial [People v. Powell, in which the officers were exonerated] might have ended differently. What the editing did for the defense in that trial was establish that the media had not told the whole truth. From that premise it was a small leap for jurors who were suspicious of the media to conclude that King was a bogus victim. The jurors were visibly surprised when the complete tape was played the first time Ð and not by the defense but by the prosecutor during his opening statement. At that moment the prosecution's burden of proof became heavier.
